14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have recently been able to determine that a clear correlation exists between the body's ability to process and absorb sugar in the blood, and an individual's risk of developing mental disorders. These were found to include schizophrenia and related conditions, as well as mood swings and other such ailments. It was additionally discovered that the sugar-processing deficiency occured not only in diabetes patients, but in obese people as well. According to LiveScience, the new research could help inform a new generation of public policies, aimed at reducing the incidence of such disease in the United States.
“In the diabetic population [for example] 25 percent are depressed – in the normal population, it's only 10 percent,” explains Vanderbilt University study researcher Aurelio Galli, who holds an appointment as a biophysicist. He explains that the level of sugar in the human body is regulated by the essential hormone insulin, which cannot be readily processed in diabetics. In obese individuals, their excess weight doesn't necessarily translate into impaired insulin production, but it does increase the risk of diabetes, which then translates into the body becoming unable to make the most of this hormone.
In a research conducted on unsuspecting lab mice, it was found that these creatures tended to exhibit schizophrenia-like symptoms when they were genetically engineered to be deficient in processing insulin. "So these abnormalities are quite simple. Let's say you scare a person by yelling at them from behind. If you prepare this person with a sound test before you yell at them, they will normally be startled less, because they're more prepared for it. In people with schizophrenia, they're startled even if you prepare them beforehand. Now it doesn't mean that you have schizophrenia if you experience this, but a lot of people with schizophrenia have this, and these mice do as well,” Galli says.
In a new paper detailing the findings, which appears in the June 8 online issue of the respected open-access scientific journal PLoS Biology, researchers add that insulin also plays a major role in regulating the supply of dopamine to the brain. The study also revealed that the inhibition of a transporter protein called NET had beneficial effects in alleviating schizophrenia symptoms in the rodents. The small molecule is usually involved in processing the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine, inside the synapses between neurons, LiveScience reports.