Ordinarily, the organ most associated with diabetes is the pancreas. After all, that’s where insulin is made. However, researchers from Boston suggest that the liver deserves a closer look.
This team of researchers bred genetically altered mice, so the insulin receptor cells in their livers would not respond to insulin. Under normal conditions, when an increase in insulin is detected the liver stops producing glucose and starts storing excess glucose as glycogen in your liver and muscles. Both processes lower your blood sugar level.
Since the mice livers couldn’t detect whether or not insulin was present, the liver had no way of knowing how much glucose was in the blood. A significant increase in blood sugar was found, a condition called hyperglycemia.
Sometimes your cells become desensitized to insulin, and glucose can’t get into your cells even if insulin is present. This is called insulin resistance, and it too can cause hyperglycemia.
Despite the pancreas releasing more insulin, glucose remained high, leading researchers to believe that the cause was the liver’s inability to detect high insulin levels. This, in turn, indicates that the liver plays a much larger role in keeping blood sugar levels stable than previously thought.
A few other interesting observations were made about these mice. Their livers had not developed properly. They had dysfunctional tissue, damaged cells, and more fat in their liver tissue. Albumin, a protein that helps keep the fluid content of the blood constant, decreased by 50 percent.
From these congenital malformations of the mice’s liver, the researchers concluded that insulin must play an important role in normal liver development. They also noted that the mice’s pancreases produced less insulin.
Having the insulin receptor knocked out caused these mice to become hyperglycemic and their cells to become insulin resistant.
Since all this knowledge has only recently been discovered, further research into the liver’s role in diabetes is needed, and this new information must be incorporated into current understanding of diabetes.