Oral Carnosine Supplementation Restores Insulin Sensitivity but not Glucose Tolerance in Mice With Glutathione Peroxidase-4 Deficiency

Abstract

Obesity presents in about 90% of the diabetic patients, a risk factor that makes them more susceptible to cardiometabolic disorders, particularly insulin resistance and ultimately T2 diabetes. Increased oxidative stress and specifically lipid peroxidation are known to be major pathogenic factors driving these disorders in obesity. We recently reported that diabetic patients were found to have significantly lower level of glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPx4)- an antioxidant selenoenzyme which neutralizes lipid peroxides. Carnosine, a histidine-containing dipeptide which is highly concentrated in muscle and brain, has shown a remarkable therapeutic potential for preventing diabetes and its complications when administered orally in experimental and clinical studies of obesity. The extent to which carnosine can mitigate these disorders in the presence of GPx4 deficiency is not known however, and this is critical to determining its efficacy in diabetes patients. To address this question, wild-type (WT) and GPx4+/− male were randomly assigned to either standard chow (CNTL) or high fat high sucrose diet (HFHS) for 16 weeks. Seven weeks after starting the diet, half of the HFHS diet groups received 80 mM carnosine oral carnosine supplementation in their drinking water. Glucose and insulin tolerance tests performed 8 weeks after starting the diet revealed that carnosine significantly improved glucose tolerance in obese WT (P<0.05) but not obese GPx4+/− mice. Interestingly, carnosine treatment did significantly improve insulin sensitivity in the GPx4+/− mice, and to a lesser extent the WT mice. At the molecular level, we observed that HFHS diet up-regulated GPx4 protein in cardiac tissue from WT but not GPx4+/− mice, and protein oxidation was significantly reduced with carnosine treatment in both genotypes. Collectively, these findings indicate that carnosine supplementation could potentially mitigate insulin resistance even in patients with compromised antioxidant capacity (e.g., diabetes). Further analysis is in progress to evaluate the effectiveness of carnosine supplementation on additional cardiometabolic complications that are associated with diet induced obesity. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.