Sedentary lifestyle and sugary diet more detrimental to men
University of Missouri-Columbia
A new study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine is the first evidence in humans that short-term lifestyle changes can disrupt the response to insulin of blood vessels. It's also the first study to show men and women react differently to these changes.
Vascular insulin resistance is a feature of obesity and type 2
diabetes that contributes to vascular disease. Researchers examined vascular
insulin resistance in 36 young and healthy men and women by exposing them to 10
days of reduced physical activity, cutting their step count from 10,000 to
5,000 steps per day. The participants also increased their sugary beverage
intake to six cans of soda per day.
"We know that incidence of insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease is lower in premenopausal women compared to men, but we wanted to see how men and women reacted to reduced physical activity and increased sugar in their diet over a short period of time," said Camila Manrique-Acevedo, MD, associate professor of medicine.
The results showed that only in men did the sedentary lifestyle
and high sugar intake cause decreased insulin-stimulated leg blood flow and a
drop in a protein called adropin, which regulates insulin sensitivity and is an
important biomarker for cardiovascular disease.
"These findings underscore a sex-related difference in the
development of vascular insulin resistance induced by adopting a lifestyle high
in sugar and low on exercise," said Manrique-Acevedo. "To our
knowledge, this is the first evidence in humans that vascular insulin
resistance can be provoked by short-term adverse lifestyle changes, and it's
the first documentation of sex-related differences in the development of
vascular insulin resistance in association with changes in adropin
levels."
Manrique-Acevedo said she would next like to examine how long it
takes to reverse these vascular and metabolic changes and more fully assess the
impact of the role of sex in the development of vascular insulin resistance.
The entire MU research team consisted of Jaume Padilla, PhD,
associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology and co-corresponding
author of this work; Luis Martinez-Lemus, DVM, PhD, professor of medical
pharmacology and physiology, and R. Scott Rector, PhD, associate professor of nutrition.
It also included postdoctoral fellows Rogerio Soares, PhD; and graduate
students James A. Smith and Thomas Jurrissen.
Their study, "Young women are protected against vascular
insulin resistance induced by adoption of an obesogenic lifestyle," was
recently published in the journal Endocrinology. Part of the
support for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health and a
VA Merit Grant. The content does not necessarily represent the official views
of the funding agency. The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.
Manrique-Acevedo and her collaborators work from the Roy Blunt
NextGen Precision Health building at MU, which anchors the statewide initiative
to unite government and industry leaders with innovators from across the
system's four research universities in pursuit of life-changing precision
health advancements. The University of Missouri System's bold NextGen
initiative highlights the promise of personalized health care and the impact of
large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration.
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