“We are slowly piecing together the mechanism that links [blood sugar] to brain health,” says Andrew Mason, PhD, lead study author and a researcher at the University of Liverpool.
“Our research suggests that keeping blood sugar stable may be good not only for diabetes prevention,but also for brain health in the longer term,” adds Vicky Garfield, PhD, a study coauthor and genetic epidemiologist also at the University of Liverpool in England.
Genetic Analysis Linked Blood Sugar Spikes to Alzheimer’s Risk
For the study, researchers analyzed genetic data from more than 350,000 people between the ages of 40 and 69 who participated in the UK Biobank, a long-term biomedical database.
The researchers zeroed in on markers of how the body processes sugar, specifically looking at genes related to:
- Fasting glucose, or blood sugar levels when someone hasn’t eaten for at least eight hours
- Insulin, a hormone naturally produced by the pancreas that helps the body move sugar from the blood into cells for energy
- Blood sugar levels two hours after eating
The researchers then used a technique called Mendelian randomization to see whether these factors were likely to play a role in dementia risk.
The analysis suggested that people with a lifelong predisposition to higher glucose levels two hours after eating had a 69 percent higher relative risk of developing alzheimer’s dementia compared with those who don’t have the genetic risk, Dr. Garfield explains.
“But it doesn’t mean 69 out of 100[pe[pe
