STEAM Register Editorial Team
Air pollution, which was recently discovered to be a potential contributor to Alzheimer’s disease, has now been found to increase your risk of developing insulin resistance as a pre-diabetic state of type 2 diabetes, according to scientists from Helmholtz Zentrum München and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD).
“Whether the disease becomes manifest and when this occurs is not only due to lifestyle or genetic factors, but also due to traffic-related air pollution,” Professor Annette Peters, director of the Institute of Epidemiology II at Helmholtz Zentrum München and head of the research area of epidemiology of the DZD, said in a statement.
For the study, which is published in the journal Diabetes, the researchers analyzed the data of nearly 3,000 participants of the KORA study who live in the city of Augsburg and two adjacent rural counties, all of whom were interviewed and physically examined. The researchers also took fasting blood samples to determine various markers for insulin resistance and inflammation. In addition, leptin was examined as adipokine, which has been suggested to be associated with insulin resistance. Non-diabetic individuals underwent an oral glucose tolerance test to detect whether their glucose metabolism was impaired. This data was then compared with the concentrations of air pollutants at the place of residence of the participants.
“The results revealed that people who already have an impaired glucose metabolism, so-called pre-diabetic individuals, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution,” said Dr. Kathrin Wolf, lead author of the study. “In these individuals, the association between increases in their blood marker levels and increases in air pollutant concentrations is particularly significant! Thus, over the long term – especially for people with impaired glucose metabolism – air pollution is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.”
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