When thinking about the body
type of individuals with Type II diabetes, people often envision obese men and
women. Well, researchers from the University of Utah are suggesting that skinny
people may have just as much of a chance, or an even greater chance of
developing this disease that affects about 29 million Americans today.
Type II diabetes is a disease
in which a person’s body cannot use insulin properly in order to maintain
healthy blood-glucose levels. Although an excess of adipose tissue can predispose
an individual to this disease, the research done in Utah suggests that the
accumulation of ceramides, which are toxic fat metabolites, have a greater
impact on the chances of a person becoming diabetic. When a person overeats
food high in fat content, the extra fat consumed can be stored as
triglycerides, used for energy, or converted to ceramides. The accumulation of ceramides in a person’s
adipocytes negatively affects a person’s ability to properly respond to insulin
and burn calories.
Over the course of three years,
research was done on both mice and human subjects in which the number of
ceramides were observed in both populations. The results from both groups
linked higher numbers of ceramides to a higher risk of developing diabetes.
They also observed that if a subject proved to have less ceramides, they were
actually protected from being insulin resistant. A group of obese individuals
from Singapore, some with and some without type II diabetes, were observed
after gastric bypass surgery, as well. What they found was that those with type
II diabetes had more ceramides than those who did not have the disease. These
findings suggest that the accumulation of ceramides in adipose tissue is
actually a better indicator of a person’s predisposition for obtaining this Type
II diabetes, rather than if a person is obese or not. Accumulating ceramides is
something that the researchers believe some people are genetically wired to do.
The next step of their research will be to determine which gene is responsible
for this unfortunate mutation.
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