Program ID: Innovation Anthology #61
Program Date: 08/28/2007
Program Category: Health and Medicine
Fat Secretions Induce Insulin Resistance
Type 2 diabetes is on the rise in Canada and fat may play a bigger role than previously thought.
Your body’s adipose tissue or fat not only provides a storage site for excess calories, it also an active endocrine organ that secretes biochemical substances that influence the way insulin behaves in the body.
According to University of Alberta researcher Dr. David Wright, some of these secretions actually induce insulin resistance, a precurser to the development of Type 2 diabetes.
DR. DAVID WRIGHT: What we’re in the process of doing is intervening with exercise interventions to see if we can prevent or reverse these early changes in adipose tissue metabolism. And to do that, we’ve been using a rat model of high fat feeding. So we feed these rats a very, very high fat diet. And we can induce insulin resistance in about 4 to 6 weeks. And then we’re also doing concurrent studies where we’re actually swim training rats. And we induce a training effect.
If successful Dr. Wright hopes to use exercise as a non-pharmaceutical treatment for insulin resistance to replace current drugs may cause heart attacks in some diabetes patients.
Thanks today to the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Images
Dr. David Wright
