Photo: UMass Chan
In a new Voices of UMass Chan podcast, Jason Kim, PhD, professor of molecular medicine and medicine and director of the Metabolic Disease Research Center, discussed his research into the link between Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes.
“Studies have shown that about 80 percent of people with Alzheimer's disease have type 2 diabetes. And this cannot be just purely coincidental. There must be a biological connection between these two common human diseases,” Dr. Kim said.
Kim was awarded a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to study the relationship between the two diseases. Dorothy Schafer, PhD, the UMass Chan Medical School Chair in Biomedical Research I and associate professor of neurobiology, is a co-investigator on the study. They will examine the impact of age-associated changes in peripheral metabolism on neurodegeneration, mainly focusing on insulin resistance and inflammation in the liver. This is a timely award for Kim who last year received a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to study metabolic liver disease, a major comorbidity of type 2 diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes is a global disease affecting more than 550 million people, and Alzheimer’s disease afflicts more than 55 million people worldwide, according to the estimated figures from the International Diabetes Federation and Alzheimer’s Disease International.
For Kim, the quest to uncover answers to these diseases comes from a personal place. While graduating college at the University of California Irvine, he experienced the untimely and sudden death of his young aunt. She died from undiagnosed diabetes, which had led to kidney failure, he said. He was propelled into the field where answers are now starting to surface.
“Over the past 30 years, through the work of our lab and many others, we know a lot more about type 2 diabetes than we’ve ever known before and have thus experienced an exciting paradigm shift,” said Kim.
Listen to the full Voices of UMass Chan podcast here: umassmed.edu/voices. Subscribe through SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
