The Enteroinsular Axis Revisited

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Abstract
THE connection between the gastrointestinal tract and pancreatic islets has been described as the enteroinsular axis.1 It comprises a network including nutrients, enteric hormones, and neural signals that together mediate or modulate the release of islet-cell hormones. The importance of a gut-endocrine interaction, originally proposed in the 19th century, became clear in the 1960s when it was found that glucose administered orally caused the release of two to three times more insulin than a comparable amount of glucose administered intravenously. The term "incretin," coined by Zunz and LaBarre in 1929, now embraces all the insulinotropic substances originating in the gastrointestinal . . .