Grant: Project Grant

As they age, people with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) suffer a faster decline in memory and thinking abilities, allowing dementia to set in on average 2 years earlier than in people without T2DM. As people live longer with T2DM, strategies to protect the brain from the debilitating and costly cognitive complications of T2DM are urgently needed. Current medications for T2DM improve blood sugar control, but they do not fully correct the hormone changes seen in T2DM. New evidence suggests that lower levels of a particular hormone released from bone during exercise, osteocalcin, is associated with brain changes and thinking abilities in older people. This hormone is 35% lower in people with T2DM, but it remains to be seen whether it can explain the deficits in memory that commonly occur in T2DM. We aim to show that lower levels of osteocalcin in the blood predict poorer memory and thinking abilities in people with T2DM. We also aim to show that the benefits of a 6 month exercise program are limited in T2DM by low osteocalcin levels. We will follow people with T2DM as they undertake either 6 months of exercise or an education intervention, to see if exercise increases osteocalcin levels. We will also compare the exercising T2DM group to a control group without T2DM of similar age, gender and body weight undertaking the same exercise intervention to see if people with T2DM can attain the same increases in osteocalcin and cognition when they exercise as people without T2DM. Overall, this study will determine if the body uses osteocalcin to protect against cognitive decline, and if T2DM blocks these benefits. The study will determine whether the osteocalcin system could be targeted with new drugs to prevent cognitive decline in people with T2DM.