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Yong Xu

Yong Xu

Co-author, Professor at Baylor College of Medicine

Appears in 1 story

Stories

Scientists discover metformin controls blood sugar through the brain, not just the liver

New Capabilities

Active researcher in hypothalamic neuroscience

More than 150 million people take metformin every year to manage Type 2 diabetes. Doctors have prescribed it since 1957, and for most of that time, the consensus was that it works primarily in the liver and gut. A team at Baylor College of Medicine has now shown that at clinically relevant low doses, metformin actually lowers blood sugar by deactivating a protein called Rap1 in a specific cluster of brain neurons — the ventromedial hypothalamus — that acts as a metabolic control center.

Updated 4 hours ago