Restoring balance in diabetes | Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Access through your institution Buy or subscribe In humans with diabetes and in animal models of the disease, the hypothalamo–pituitary–adrenal axis is often hyperactive, resulting in

abnormally high levels of the adrenal steroid cortisol (corticosterone in rodents). Elevated corticosterone levels have adverse effects on cognition in other circumstances, such as stress,

and so the authors reasoned that they might also mediate the effects of diabetes on learning. To test this idea, they normalized the levels of corticosterone in two animal models of diabetes

— streptozocin-treated rats, which model the insulin-dependent form of the disease, and obese mice that carry a mutation in the leptin receptor (_db_/_db_ mice), which model

insulin-resistant diabetes — by removing the adrenal glands and treating the animals with low levels of corticosterone, and examined the animals' performance in learning and memory

tasks. Normalizing corticosterone levels in this way reversed the learning deficits that are usually seen in diabetic animals in hippocampus-dependent tests of both spatial learning (water

maze) and recognition memory (novel-object preference). To confirm the central role of corticosterone in mediating these effects, the authors treated a separate group of adrenalectomized

animals with high levels of corticosterone and showed that this resulted in learning and memory impairments that were equivalent to those that are seen in sham-operated diabetic animals.

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calculated during checkout ADDITIONAL ACCESS OPTIONS: * Log in * Learn about institutional subscriptions * Read our FAQs * Contact customer support ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER * Stranahan, A. M.

et al. Diabetes impairs hippocampal function through glucocorticoid-mediated effects in new and mature neurons. _Nature Neurosci._ 17 Feb 2008 (doi:10.1038/nn2055) Article  CAS  Google

Scholar  Download references Authors * Katherine Whalley View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions

ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Whalley, K. Restoring balance in diabetes. _Nat Rev Neurosci_ 9, 252–253 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2355 Download citation * Issue Date: April

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