glucose intolerance and oxygen

November 2, 2016 10:15 AM

What is the known relationship between glucose intolerance (that can lead to diabetes, if I understand correctly) and oxygen? Specifically, I'm curious if lower oxygen levels lead to glucose intolerance, or the other way around.

I'm reading this passage here:

In a population-based sample of 116 men who had hypertension, 25 had diabetes mellitus. Although obesity was the main risk factor for diabetes, coexistent severe OSA added to the risk, and SDB influenced plasma insulin and glycemia independently of central obesity [63]. In 150 healthy, overweight, middle-aged men recruited from the community, OSA (defined as AHI ≥5) was associated with a twofold risk for glucose intolerance, independent of BMI and percent body fat measured with hydrodensitometry [64]. The impairment in glucose tolerance correlated with the severity of oxygen desaturation, whereas an increasing AHI was independently associated with worsening insulin resistance.

I'm interested in the highlighted portion. Is there to way to know how the correlation works between those two?

posted by SpacemanStix to Health & Fitness (3 answers total)

You can't really say because of the confounding variable of OSA, but I'd put real good money on the chain of causality here being increased metabolic derangement->higher BMI->worse OSA->worse SaO2 during sleep, rather than the other way around. Even though the blurb does suggest that the study adjusted for BMI, we don't know the effect of BMI within the OSA group - I would expect to see an association there.
posted by un petit cadeau at 11:37 AM on November 2, 2016

Best answer: If you scroll down just a little further in the same paper there's a section entitled "Mechanistic links of sleep-disordered breathing and derangements of glucose metabolism" that explores some of the proposed causal relationships, especially those that have been studied in the lab (e.g. in mice).
posted by telegraph at 2:05 PM on November 2, 2016

Response by poster: That's perfect, thanks to you both.
posted by SpacemanStix at 4:22 PM on November 2, 2016