Figure 1.

Growth in publications and terminology related to bone marrow adiposity. The number of publications and unique terms relevant to the study of bone marrow adiposity (BMA) are shown, arranged by decade of publication. Also shown is the total number of papers indexed in PubMed for each time period. Publications relevant to BMA were identified through a systematic search of PubMed using the following terms: “marrow[Title] AND (fat[Title/Abstract] OR adipose[Title/Abstract] OR adipocyte[Title/Abstract] OR adiposity[Title/Abstract])”; publication dates up to 31/07/2019 were included. Because earlier studies (e.g., pre-1950) are often not indexed in PubMed, many of these papers were added manually based on our existing knowledge of the literature. Search results were then manually assessed to identify publications relevant to the study of BMA and to exclude results that were not directly relevant. This was necessary because many results related to other subjects, such as fat embolisms of bone marrow or, from 2000 onwards, adipose tissue stem cells. This approach identified 568 papers relevant to BMA nomenclature. By reading these papers, we distinguished the full range of terms that have been used to report concepts and/or measurements related to BMA research. If terms were associated with an abbreviation and/or unit of measurement, these were also recorded. Together, this generated a list of 519 unique combinations of term, abbreviation and unit; if two papers used the same term (e.g., bone marrow adipocyte) but with different abbreviations or units (e.g., BMAd vs. BM-AD), then these were counted as two unique terms. The number of papers and unique terms used per decade are shown. Key concepts and methods are described in Table 1, and terms related to these are presented in Tables 2–9. Further details are provided in Supplementary Tables 1–8.