Imagine you’ve just eaten a big, yummy meal. Now, your body has to take care of all the sugar you ate and keep everything balanced.
If it can’t, it might mean you have a disease called type 2 diabetes. It’s a problem where your body can’t handle the sugar in your blood properly.
The Problem of Diabetes
Did you know that over 460 million people around the world have diabetes?
It’s a serious disease that can cause lots of health problems like trouble with your eyes, feet, nerves, and even lead to heart attacks and strokes.
Diabetes is more common in older people, those who are very overweight, not very active, or have it in their family genes.
The Mystery of Insulin
Our bodies use a hormone called insulin to control the sugar levels in our blood. If you have diabetes, it means your body isn’t making enough insulin or doesn’t use it well.
This is called insulin resistance. But here’s the weird part: Most of the studies about this have been done when people haven’t eaten for a while.
But we eat a lot, right? So, the studies didn’t tell us what happens to insulin after we eat. That’s a big question because what happens after we eat is very important for understanding diabetes.
The Big Experiment
A team of scientists from around the world decided to try to answer this question. They looked at the DNA of more than 55,000 people.
They wanted to see if certain genes made a difference in how insulin worked after a person had a sugary drink.
The scientists found 10 parts of the DNA, called loci, that are linked to insulin resistance after the sugary drink.
Eight of these loci are also connected to a higher chance of getting diabetes. This shows that these parts of the DNA are very important.
The Discovery of GLUT4
One of these loci was inside a gene that makes a protein called GLUT4. This protein helps cells take in sugar from the blood after eating.
The scientists found that some people had less GLUT4 in their muscle cells. This might make it harder for their cells to take in sugar from the blood.
The scientists also found 14 other genes that might help control how much sugar gets into cells. Nine of these had never been connected to insulin before.
These genes might control how much GLUT4 gets to the cell’s surface. The less GLUT4 on the surface, the less sugar the cell can take in from the blood.
Looking Ahead
This new research gives us a better idea of how our bodies handle sugar after we eat. It might also help us figure out better ways to treat diabetes.
If we can help the body handle sugar better after a meal, we might be able to prevent diabetes in some people. The scientists are very excited about this and are hopeful about the future of diabetes treatment.
If you care about diabetes, please read studies about berry that can help prevent diabetes, obesity and cancer, and new drugs to treat diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
For more information about diabetes, please see recent studies about the normal blood sugar for people with diabetes, results showing that Zinc may be key to better diabetes treatments.
The study was published in Nature Genetics.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
