Research

Hormonal

Loss of the circadian clock gene Bmal1 in skeletal muscle causes systemic glucose intolerance and hyperglycemia by impairing insulin-stimulated glucose uptake and reducing GLUT4 expression.

Maintaining a consistent sleep-wake cycle is critical for metabolic health. Your skeletal muscles rely on their internal circadian clock to efficiently process glucose. Disrupting this rhythm (e.g., through irregular sleep or shift work) can impair insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance, contributing to higher blood sugar levels and increased diabetes risk.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
These findings suggest that the muscle is relying predominantly on fat as a fuel with increased protein breakdown to support the TCA cycle... Our findings have implicated altered molecular clock dictating significant changes in altered substrate metabolism... These data support a fundamental role for Bmal1, the endogenous circadian clock, in glucose metabolism in the skeletal muscle.
Brianna D. Harfmann et al. · Skeletal Muscle · 2016

Why this rating

High-quality animal model (inducible knockout) with rigorous metabolic phenotyping, though not human clinical data.

Source

Muscle-specific loss of Bmal1 leads to disrupted tissue glucose metabolism and systemic glucose homeostasis

Brianna D. Harfmann et al. · Skeletal Muscle · 2016

DOI 10.1186/s13395-016-0082-x

mechanism_onlyCited 230×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

This is one finding among thousands. Every one is graded and traced to its source, so you can see what the evidence actually supports. Browse the research →