Short-term lifestyle changes can impair blood vessel sensitivity to insulin: Study

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The first human study that discovered that short-term lifestyle changes can impair blood vessel sensitivity to insulin is a recent one from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Additionally, this study also demonstrated how these alterations affect men and women differently. The findings of the study were recently published in the journal Endocrinology. 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 causes 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." 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.

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