Researchers working with mice have found that two hormones (insulin and leptin) tied to diabetes may also play a role in the fertility of women. In fact, mice with the greatest number of cells in the brain that had trouble processing the hormones also produced a smaller number of offspring each litter and had trouble breeding.
The study also indicates that there isn’t always a link between Type 2 diabetes and obesity, which may help explain why an increasing number of thinner people have been developing the disease in recent years.
“Many people, and even many physicians, think you develop diabetes that is solely secondary to obesity,” says Joe Elmquist, one of the study’s authors. ”We can make the animals very diabetic without obesity, suggesting that there may be a circuit or path of resistance to these signals in the brain that helps explain the powerful anti-diabetic actions of leptin.”
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