Insulin resistance—when the body doesn’t properly respond to insulin, a hormone that helps control blood glucose levels—is one of the fundamental causes of diabetes. In addition to diabetes, it is widely known that insulin resistance can lead to cardiovascular, kidney and liver diseases. While insulin resistance is tightly associated with obesity, it has been difficult to evaluate insulin resistance itself in the clinic. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, applied a machine learning-based prediction model of insulin resistance to half a million participants from the UK Biobank and demonstrated that insulin resistance is a risk factor for 12 types of cancer.
This article was originally published on MedicalXpress.com
