Could Vitamin A Deficiency Lead to Diabetes?

Vitamin A deficiency may be a contributing factor in the development of type 2 diabetes, according to a recent study in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

In people with vitamin A deficiency, the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas do not function properly, leading to insulin resistance. This new research established just how crucial vitamin A is to the life of insulin-producing beta cells. 
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

RELATED CONTENT
Vitamin A Use Today and Its Potential Toxicities
When Is Pancreas Transplantation Indicated?
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“The beta cells of the pancreas are exquisitely sensitive to the lack of vitamin A in the diet—they die even though many other cell types in the body do not die under these conditions,” say study authors Lorraine J. Gudas, Ph.D., chairman of the department of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, NY, and Steven J. Trasino, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the same department. “This is quite fascinating and was not appreciated by researchers or physicians before.”

Gudas, Trasino, and their colleagues looked at beta cell development in two separate groups of adult mice: a normal control group and a group with genetic modifications that made them unable to store dietary vitamin A.

The genetically modified mice experienced beta cell death and weren’t able to produce insulin. The researchers aren’t sure how the lack of vitamin A causes the death of insulin-producing beta cells but they hope to answer that question in the future.

They also noted that removing vitamin A from the diets of the healthy mice led to significant beta cell loss, which reduced insulin production and increased blood glucose levels—both of which are key factors in the development of type 2 diabetes.

Yet, when they reintroduced dietary vitamin A to the mice, beta cell production and insulin production rose and blood glucose returned to normal levels.

“Our data clearly show that restoring vitamin A can somehow reverse the destruction of the insulin-producing cells in mice that were previously vitamin A deficient, pointing to an essential role for vitamin A in the survival of insulin-producing beta cells,” Gudas and Trasino say.

They are continuing their research on vitamin A and type 2 diabetes in mouse models of type 2 diabetes and also are planning to test their pre-clinical findings in human subjects who are at risk for developing type 2 diabetes and who currently have type 2 diabetes.

“Given that there is a strong clinical interest in developing drugs that can preserve or restore insulin-producing beta cells in both forms of diabetes, our work sets the platform to test if vitamin A or synthetic analogs of vitamin A can restore the insulin-producing beta cells in humans with either type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes,” they say.

—Colleen Mullarkey

Reference

Trasino SE, Benoit YD, Gudas LJ. Vitamin A deficiency causes hyperglycemia and loss of pancreatic β-cell mass. J Biol Chem. 2014 Dec 1. [Epub ahead of print]