Washington, Aug 27: Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut have warned that people smoking at a relatively young age and abandoning the habit may not necessarily escape suffering from the risk of diabetes. Thomas B. Price, Suchitra Krishnan Sarin, and Douglas L. Rothman, authors of "Smoking Impairs Muscle Recovery from Exercise", suggested that there was a dose-response relationship between smoking and the risk of diabetes.
They said that many take up smoking at a young age believing that if they stop soon enough, they will escape adverse health consequences. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Young people are unaware that cigarette use is linked to insulin resistance and insulin-dependent glucose metabolism, which are major risk factors in the development of adult-onset diabetes, a disease that can reach epidemic proportions.
The research, which appears in the July issue of the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism, said that despite public and privately sponsored anti-tobacco campaigns and efforts by health educators, most American children and adolescents smoked quite regularly.

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They were of the opinion that impaired insulin-stimulated muscle glycogen synthesis is an early defect in the cause of diabetes and is present in individuals at high risk of diabetes before the development of impaired glucose tolerance.

This was so because of significant differences in glycogen replenishment attributed to hormone insulin. The hormone's many functions include the transportation of glucose into liver and muscle tissues and to stimulate the synthesis of carbohydrate into muscle glycogen, which is how the muscle stores energy, the researchers said.
Because insulin is essential in replenishing muscle glycogen after exercise, the researchers focused on enhancing insulin release during recovery. It is well known that increasing the amount of carbohydrate consumed will increase insulin levels and result in more muscle glycogen storage.

To evaluate smoking-induced effects on carbohydrate metabolism, the researchers studied muscle glycogen recovery from exercise in a young healthy population of eight smokers and ten non-control subjects. The study used spectroscopy to compare muscle glycogen and glucose 6-phosphate levels.

The smokers aged between 22 and 26 years of age and weighing in at between 66 and 74 kg; consumed at least 20 cigarettes a day. The control group of ten non-smokers was of similar age and weight.

The subjects of the study were asked to perform single-leg toe raises to review glycogen concentrations and it was found that both groups depleted similar amounts of glycogen over a similar period of time while performing a similar amount of work.

After exercise, there was steady glycogen resynthesis for approximately one hour that was similar in both groups. During the four hours of recovery, steady glycogen synthesis continued at a reduced rate in the control group; however, glycogen synthesis ceased in the smokers.

During this recovery period, the glycogen synthesis rate in the smoking group was 74 per cent lower than in the control group.


Total glycogen recovery over the four-hour measurement period was significantly greater (1.9-fold) in controls than in smokers.


This study also suggests that insulin-dependent muscle glycogen synthesis is impaired in a healthy population of young smokers, much like that observed in pre-diabetic subjects.
Bureau Report