Abstract
The worldwide explosion of the rates of diabetes and other metabolic diseases in the last few decades cannot be fully explained only by changes in the prevalence of classical lifestyle-related risk factors, such as physical inactivity and poor diet. For this reason, it has been recently proposed that other “nontraditional” risk factors could contribute to the diabetes epidemics. In particular, an increasing number of reports indicate that chronic exposure to and accumulation of a low concentration of environmental pollutants (especially the so-called persistent organic pollutants (POPs)) within the body might be associated with diabetogenesis. In this review, the epidemiological evidence suggesting a relationship between dioxin and other POPs exposure and diabetes incidence will be summarized, and some recent developments on the possible underlying mechanisms, with particular reference to dioxin, will be presented and discussed.
Highlights
Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common chronic diseases, and its prevalence has exploded over the last several decades
We explored the secretory response of isolated islets to the non-glucose secretagogue, 2-ketoisocaproate (2-KIC), which is one of the few physiological substrates apart from glucose that initiates a sustained insulin release from beta cells [115,116,117], and we found that 2-KIC-induced insulin release was better preserved in TCDD-treated rats, indirectly confirming that the impairment in the secretory performance observed in pancreatic islets isolated from TCDD-treated rats was strictly linked to the failure of glucose to induce insulin secretion in beta cells [113]
In the last few decades, a considerable body of epidemiological evidence has been accumulated, whose conclusions strongly suggest that exposure to dioxin and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs) can be considered as a new risk factor for diabetes in humans in addition to the traditional lifestyle-related factors, such as excess of energy intake and a lack of exercise [14,43]
Summary
Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common chronic diseases, and its prevalence has exploded over the last several decades. Endocrine disrupting chemicals have been defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “exogenous agents that interfere with the production, release, transport, metabolism, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body responsible for the maintenance of homeostasis, reproduction, development, and/or behavior” [7,8,9,10] Many of these pollutants ( not all; see, e.g., the case of bisphenol A) were banned in most Western countries in the 1970s and 1980s, with a consequent diminution of their levels in the environment, but they are still detected in humans, especially in those subgroups of the general population that still show an elevated body burden due to dietary habits and current and past exposure [11,12,13]
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