The Added Benefit of Blood Sugar Control: Get Smarter!

The Stanford researchers and their colleagues found that using a continuous blood glucose monitor helps keep blood sugar levels within the normal range, which is associated with better performance on cognitive tests

According to a pilot study co-led by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Inner Moore Child Health System in Jacksonville, Florida, tight blood sugar control can reduce differences

The study was published on Aug.

The body of a type 1 diabetic stops producing insulin, a hormone

In a randomized controlled trial, the researchers evaluated the use of automated treatment techniques versus routine care for a period of 6 months

Allan Reiss, MD, MD, lead author of the study, Howard Robbins Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medical School and Professor of Radiology, said: "This is a powerful indication that by significantly improving glucose control, people can mitigate or even reverse some of the harmful effects

The fact that both brain structure and cognitive abilities improved after just six months, Reiss said, is particularly alarming

The study's senior author, Dr Nelly Mauras, a pediatric endocrinologist at Nemour's Children's Health and Mayo Clinic School of Medicine and Sciences, said: "These results offer hope that

Improvements in cognition and brain structure

People with type 1 diabetes must calculate the carbohydrates they consume, monitor blood sugar levels, and inject themselves with insulin regularly so that the body can process the sugar

But recent advances in diabetes technology have made things a little easier

The researchers randomly assigned 44 study participants to undergo closed-loop monitoring or standard diabetes care for a period of 6 months

Six months later, the closed-loop group showed greater progress than the control group on standard tests of perceptual reasoning or nonverbal reasoning skills, which assessed the ability to

Previous research by these researchers suggests that children and adolescents with diabetes need to activate more cognitive resources to reach the same level of brain performance as normally developing children; In other words, brain activity is enhanced to compensate for disease-related losses

When the researchers looked at the brain imaging of the study participants six months later, they found that in the closed-loop group, several aspects of brain structure looked more like normally developing adolescents

As the mature brain of a teenager prunes the connections between neurons and the most important neurons, the volume of gray matter usually declines
.

Adolescents in the closed-loop group also had more white matter, meaning they had better isolation of important remote connections in their brains that often became more effective during puberty and coincided with healthy brain development in adolescents
.

Reiss said: "The better the blood sugar control, the more pronounced the changes in gray and white matter in the brain, which is consistent
with the higher the efficiency of the brain when it matures.
" Gray matter is where information processing and decision-making occur, while white matter consists of a set of fibers that connect different brain regions to each other and to other parts of the
nervous system.
Overall, the closed-loop group is closer to the direction of typical adolescent brain development
.
"

Because both patients had good and poor glycemic control in both groups, the researchers reanalyzed their data based on how successful they were, regardless of the treatment group
.
They found that people with better blood sugar control had more normal brain structure and cognitive abilities
.

Reiss notes that previous studies on tightly controlled blood sugar have shown that it can reduce the incidence of diabetes complications such as blindness, kidney failure and amputations
.

The Stanford research team is planning a follow-up study to confirm their findings in a wider age group and see if there are additional benefits to newer closed-loop monitoring devices that are easier to use
than those available at the time of the 2018-2020 study.

"This study gives hope that with significant improvements in blood sugar control, perhaps most of the harmful effects of diabetes can be mitigated or reversed
," Reiss said.
"It's a laugh, and it's important
.
"