Prediabetes guidelines uk
Obese but otherwise normal nondiabetic patients have substantially increased insulin resistance compared to lean patients. Fasting insulin, a measure of the amount of insulin in the blood that reflects underlying insulin resistance, increases through the spectrum of obesity, prediabetes, and then type 2 diabetes.
This suggests that obesity could be the root cause of increased insulin resistance. But despite spending millions of dollars and doing decades of intensive research on possible hormonal mediators between obesity and insulin resistance, no causal link could be made.
After all, if obesity causes insulin resistance, how could type 2 diabetes develop in normal-weight patients?
And why do so many prediabetes guidelines uk people not develop type 2 diabetes? The converse, the idea that insulin resistance causes obesity, is implausible since obesity typically predates insulin resistance.
The only remaining possibility is that some X factor is the underlying cause of both obesity and insulin resistance. The connection, as we shall see, is too much insulin.
The X factor is hyperinsulinemia.