• Question: Do you research heredetory, type 1 or type 2 diabetes?

    Asked by danielcropper to Heather, Elaine, Keith on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by sampalmer16.
    • Photo: Heather Eyre

      Heather Eyre answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Yes I do.

      Diabetes has some genetic background but it’s a bit more complicated than eye colour.

      You can inherit a greater chance of getting type-1 or type-2 diabetes. This is called a genetic predisposition; it doesn’t mean that you will get diabetes just that you are more likely to when compared to everyone else like you (that’s people of the same age, fitness and ethnic background).

      You’d actually expect type-1 diabetes to have a stronger family link than type-2, but it’s the other way around. If you had an identical twin with type-1 diabetes it’s less than 50% whether you’d develop it too, if they had type-2 diabetes the risk is less than 75%.

      It doesn’t matter how many people in your family have diabetes you can reduce the risk of you developing diabetes by being active and eating well.

    • Photo: Keith Siew

      Keith Siew answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Back in my undergraduate degree I used to research a protein called Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Protein-1 (IGFBP-1) which controls the amount of Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1) that can interact with cells, this hormone is very closely related to insulin in both structure and function.

      An important feature of IGF-1 is that it has the ability to “fine tune” the bodies response to insulin, as it can increase the response of cells to insulin… i.e. we’ll say that 1 molecule of insulin stimulates 1 molecule of sugar to be taken up… but with IGF-1 present 1 molecule of insulin now stimulates 10 molecules of sugar to be taken up.

      I studied the relationship between Insulin, IGF-1 and IGFBP-1 in the development of Diabesity (Diabetes Type 2 + Obesity) using wildtype mice (normal genetics) and IGFBP-1 knockout mice (where we deleted the gene for IGFBP-1) fed for 12 weeks on a 45% fat diet!!!

      So they got pretty fat… but the exciting result we found was that the IGFBP-1 knockout mice had a protection against obesity! The wildtype mice increased their bodyweight ~45% (of starting weight) over the 12 week period while the knockout mice only gained ~28%.

      We suspect that to properly treat diabetes both types 1 & 2… you also need to look at keeping the IGF-1 and IGFBPs in balance also! So this is an on going area of research! (Which I’m no longer involved with but keep in touch with my old lab!)

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