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Linking Environmental Toxicant Exposure To Diabetes Susceptibility, Jannifer Beth Tyrrell

Wayne State University Dissertations

An important and unresolved question in the environmental health field is whether exposure to common environmental toxicants, such as dioxin and heavy metals like Pb, increase the risk of developing diabetes, especially in combination with other common metabolic stressors such as obesity.

Previous studies suggested that dioxin exposure increased peripheral insulin resistance but did not appear to cause fasting hyperglycemia or elevated hepatic glucose output. In concordance with those findings we observed that dioxin treatment caused a strong suppression of the expression of the key hepatic gluconeogenic genes PEPCK and G6Pase. However, this suppression was not solely mediated by the …