Night-shift work is linked to an increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, a new study has found.
British and American researchers used a large health database to compare diabetes prevalence in 47,286 night-shift workers with that of 224,928 day workers.
The new research — co-authored by Dr. Aaron Michels, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora — will be published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Type 1 diabetes is a condition in which the beta cells of the pancreas are unable to produce enough insulin, which is the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels.
Every cell in your body responds to the hormone insulin, and if that process starts to fail, you get diabetes. In an unexpected finding, scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have identified four viruses that can produce insulin-like hormones that are active on human cells. The discovery brings new possibilities for revealing biological mechanisms that may cause diabetes or cancer.
"Our research may help open up a new field that we might call microbial endocrinology," says Emrah Altindis, PhD, a Joslin research fellow and lead author on a paper in the journal PNAS on the work. "We show that these viral insulin-like peptides can act on human and rodent cells. With the very large number of microbial peptides to which we are exposed, there is a novel window for host-microbe interactions. We hope that studying these processes will help us to better understand the role of microbes in human disease."
