Project 2: Hyperglycemia and the Brain

A study to investigate the impact of obesity and diabetes on cerebral glucose transport.

There is a growing body of evidence that obesity and diabetes (type 1 and type 2 diabetes) are associated with changes in cerebral metabolism; however, the underlying mechanisms and the functional clinical implications of these observations remain unclear. Using state of the art neuroimaging technology including functional MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy coupled with classic human metabolic phenotyping methodologies, our group has conducted a series of experiments to show that glucose transport into the brain can be modified by a variety of factors including hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, and glycemic variability. These findings and ongoing work in the lab may have important implications for understanding disordered feeding behavior and neurocognitive changes in human obesity, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes.

• Hwang, JJ, Jiang L, Hamza M, Belfort-DeAguiar R, Dai F, Koo B, Rothman D, Mason G, Sherwin RS. Blunted rise in brain glucose in obesity and T2DM. JCI Insight 2017 2(20)
• Hwang JJ, Jiang L, Rangel ES, Fan X, Ding Y, Lam W, Leventhal J, Dai F, Rothman DL, Mason GF, Sherwin RS. Glycemic variability and brain glucose levels in T1DM. Diabetes 2019 68:163
• Hwang JJ, Parikh, Lacadie C, Seo D, Lam W, Hamza M, Schmidt C, Dai F, Sejling AS, Belfort-DeAguiar R, Constable RT, Sinha R, Sherwin R. Hypoglycemia unawareness in Type 1 diabetes suppresses brain responses to hypoglycemia. J Clin Invest 2018 128(4):1485-1495