You might not have known that your blood sugar level and brain health are intimately linked. A recent study by University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) researchers published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that uncontrolled type 2 diabetes (T2D) can damage the part of the brain that is responsible for memory, which is also the part of the brain that is affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers gave laboratory mice juice or a sugar pellet as a reward for doing certain things in their study. One group of mice was typically healthy, while the other had hyperglycemia. The latter group was given a therapy that made their pancreas less able to make insulin, which caused their blood sugar levels to be high all the time, like they would in uncontrolled diabetes.
One big problem, of course, is that people aren’t rats, and there’s no way to know for sure that the same outcomes would happen in an experiment with people. But the researchers at UNLV think they may have found the missing pieces that explain why diabetes is such a big risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, which is marked by the buildup of plaques of specific proteins in the brain, starting with the hippocampus.
Victoria Finn, M.D., a board-certified endocrinologist at the Medical Offices of Manhattan in New York City, who was not involved in the study, noticed that although mouse and human brains are very different in many respects, they both feature the ACC and hippocampal structures. She thinks that these kinds of investigations can help researchers find early symptoms and diagnostic markers of some kinds of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s. Read the article
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