[News release] Losing 30 minutes of sleep per day may promote weight gain and adversely affect blood sugar control

From the 7 March 2015 news release at Newswise

….At 12 months, for every 30 minutes of weekday sleep debt at baseline, the risk of obesity and insulin resistance was significantly increased by 17% and 39%, respectively….

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[Press release] Unexpected turn in diabetes research suggests reinterpretation of years of research — ScienceDaily

Unexpected turn in diabetes research suggests reinterpretation of years of research — ScienceDaily.

Excerpts from the press release

Date:January 20, 2015

Source:KU Leuven

Summary:Years of diabetes research carried out on mice whose DNA had been altered with a human growth hormone gene is now ripe for reinterpretation after a new study confirms that the gene had an unintended effect on the mice’s insulin production, a key variable in diabetes research.

Years of diabetes research carried out on mice whose DNA had been altered with a human growth hormone gene is now ripe for reinterpretation after a new study by researchers at KU Leuven confirms that the gene had an unintended effect on the mice’s insulin production, a key variable in diabetes research.

Genetically modified mice have been used in medical research for over thirty years. To expedite the cutting-and-pasting of fragments of DNA, the pioneers of the method inserted a human growth hormone gene alongside other modified DNA. Researchers assumed that the DNA of the human growth hormone would remain tightly encapsulated in the modified DNA of the mouse.

They did not expect the mice to begin producing their own human growth hormone — but that appears to be exactly what happened.

KU Leuven professors Frans Schuit and John Creemers used the genetically modified mice regularly in their lab. To their surprise, they observed that the mice showed pregnancy-like symptoms despite not being pregnant at all.

Digging deeper, the researchers discovered that this pregnancy-like state was being caused by the human growth hormone, explains Professor Schuit: “In mice, the human growth hormone has the same effect as hormones that are produced by the placenta in pregnant mice. Just as in pregnancy, the cells in the pancreas that are responsible for the production of insulin change. They increase in number and begin to produce more insulin. And that happens to be exactly what we study in diabetes research.”

…

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[News article] Why is type 2 diabetes an increasing problem?

Why is type 2 diabetes an increasing problem?.

From the 14th January 2014 ScienceDaily article

Contrary to a common belief, researchers have shown that genetic regions associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes were unlikely to have been beneficial to people at stages through human evolution.

Type 2 diabetes is responsible for more than three million deaths each year and this number is increasing steadily. The harmful genetic variants associated with this common disease have not yet been eliminated by natural selection.

To try to explain why this is, geneticists have previously hypothesized that during times of ‘feast or famine’ throughout human evolution, people who had advantageous or ‘thrifty’ genes processed food more efficiently. But in the modern developed world with too much food, these same people would be more susceptible to type 2 diabetes.

“This thrifty gene theory is an attractive hypothesis to explain why natural selection hasn’t protected us against these harmful variants,” says Dr. Yali Xue, lead author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “But we find little or no evidence to corroborate this theory.”

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Read the entire article here

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New research suggests that obesity and diabetes are a downside of human evolution

New research suggests that obesity and diabetes are a downside of human evolution

New research in the FASEB Journal suggests that a gene called CMAH has been lost during the course of recent evolution, and may lead to an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes in humans

From the February 25 2011 Eureka news alert

As if the recent prediction that half of all Americans will have diabetes or pre-diabetes by the year 2020 isn’t alarming enough, a new genetic discovery published online in the FASEB Journal. *** provides a disturbing explanation as to why: we took an evolutionary “wrong turn.” In the research report, scientists show that human evolution leading to the loss of function in a gene called “CMAH” may make humans more prone to obesity and diabetes than other mammals.

“Diabetes is estimated to affect over 25 million individuals in the U.S., and 285 million people worldwide,” said Jane J. Kim, M.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, CA. “Our study for the first time links human-specific sialic acid changes to insulin and glucose metabolism and therefore opens up a new perspective in understanding the causes of diabetes.”

In this study, which is the first to examine the effect of a human-specific CMAH genetic mutation in obesity-related metabolism and diabetes, Kim and colleagues show that the loss of CMAH’s function contributes to the failure of the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in overweight humans, which is known to be a key factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. This gene encodes for an enzyme present in all mammalian species except for humans and adds a single oxygen atom to sialic acids, which are sugars that coat the cell surface.

To make their discovery, the researchers used two groups of mice. The first group had the same mutant CMAH gene found in humans. These mice demonstrated that the CMAH enzyme was inactive and could not produce a sialic acid type called NeuSGc at the cell surface. The second group had a normal CMAH gene. When exposed to a high fat diet, both sets of mice developed insulin resistance as a result of their obesity. Pancreatic beta cell failure, however, occurred only in the CMAH mutant mice that lacked NeuSGc, resulting in a decreased insulin production, which then further impaired blood glucose level control. This discovery may enhance scientific understanding of why humans may be particularly prone to develop type 2 diabetes. Results may also suggest that conventional animal models may not accurately mirror the human situation.

“The diabetes discovery is an important advance in its own right. It tells us a lot about what goes wrong in diabetes, and where to aim with new treatments,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal, “but its implications for human evolution are even greater. If this enzyme is unique to humans, it must also have given us a survival advantage over earlier species. Now the challenge is to find the function of CMAH in defending us against microbes or environmental stress or both. This evolutionary science explains how we can win some and lose some, to keep our species ahead of the extinction curve.”

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Related articles and Web sites

Related Articles

• Food Processing and Obesity (education.com)
• How Can an Unhealthy Diet Cause Diabetes? (brighthub.com)
• Diabetes (MedlinePlus) has links to overviews, basic information, health check tools, research findings, reference materials, and more