Research Paper on Insulin Resistance

📌Category: Health, Illness
📌Words: 1094
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 16 April 2022

Insulin resistance is represented by the inability for insulin to increase glucose utilization throughout your body as it normally can. Our cells usually absorb glucose to make energy. This is facilitated by insulin, which helps glucose enter the cells, but under insulin resistance, this decreases, and besides entering cells, glucose will build up in our blood streams, leading to diabetes. This usually happens when there is an excess amount of glucose for our cells to absorb. Over time, our pancreas will have to work harder to release more insulin to overcome the glucose in our bloodstreams, and eventually, it will produce less. Globally, an overwhelming number of people with insulin resistance, close to 85% of them, are adults, from ages 20 to 75, with 15% of people with insulin resistance being below 20 years of age. Also, greater quantities of visceral and hepatic adipose tissue as well as lack of estrogen may lead to men with higher levels of insulin resistance than women.

There has been a strong link between the accumulation of our visceral adipose tissue from our abdominal fat and insulin resistance. Visceral adiposity from our abdominal organs, can not only lead to an excess amount of lipids in our liver, but can also impair our body’s ability for insulin signalling, thus proving as a major inducing factor of insulin resistance. Aging skeletal muscles, which comes from older age and organelle dysfunction, resulting from overnutrition and which leads to systemic inflammation play a risk factor as well. Having foods with a high glycemic index, such as white and whole wheat bread, white rice, cereal and cereal bars, cakes, cookies, and other sweets, potatoes and fries, chips and rice crackers, fruits such as watermelon and pineapple, and sweetened dairy products like fruit yogurt, can cause a spike in your blood sugar fast, thus, contributing to insulin resistance. It has also been shown that homocysteine, a sulfur containing amino acid, can affect Pro-Insulin Receptors through its thiol group. General causes of insulin resistance can be from genetic family history, a sedentary and inactive lifestyle, race, particularly for black, hispanic, and native Americans, older age, hormones, use of steroids, medicines, bad sleeping habits, and smoking. 

There is a variety of information necessary to be diagnosed with insulin resistance, such as your diet, weight, sleep habits, smoking habits, lifestyle, medical conditions, medicines taken, family history, as well as ethnicity. There are a variety of tests doctors can use in order to diagnose a patient with insulin resistance. Patients may be tested with a fasting plasma glucose Test, which checks a patient’s blood sugar after not eating for 8 hours, a oral glucose test which includes a patient taking the fasting plasma glucose Test, drinking a sugary solution, and waiting 2 hours to receive an addition blood test, and lastly, a hemoglobin a1c test, which measures and records the average blood sugar levels of a patient for the last 2 - 3 months. There are other measures to check for insulin resistance such as the fasting insulin, homeostasis model assessment (HOMA), insulin-to-glucose ratio, Bennet Index, as well as a score derived from weighted combinations of fasting insulin. What is important to remember is that measuring insulin resistance is relatively difficult to do and thus it is hard to diagnose individuals who may have it.

Studies suggest a modest link between insulin resistance and depression among people. In one study, the correlation score between depression and insulin resistance for people in a town in the Netherlands called Hoorne was 0.156.  The prevalence of depressive symptoms however do not vary based on gender but are connected with metabolic disturbance. It is shown that depression can tend to lead towards type-2 diabetes for women and cardiovascular disease for men. Insulin resistance also leads to an increased risk for asthma and even has a higher effect on having asthma related symptoms than weight related diseases like obesity. The cardiovascular-metabolic abnormalities insulin resistance is rooted from may lead to a range of diseases including type-2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, as well as polycystic ovarian syndrome, also called hypertension. Insulin resistance can significantly impact the chances of people receiving cardiovascular diseases and is the most major cause of coronary artery disease. Skin diseases like acanthosis nigricans as well as polycystic ovary syndrome can also further develop under insulin resistance.  People with insulin resistance also have a sharp link towards Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms, prostate symptoms, lower intercourse satisfaction, and lower levels of erectile function. This signals a strong correlation between insulin resistance as well as erectile dysfunction.

There are several methods one must take to decrease insulin resistance. Some important things to do are to receive more sleep, exercise more frequently, have less stress, decrease weight, eat more soluble fiber, eat fruits and vegetables with color, reduce carbohydrate intake as well as the intake of added sugars, include herbs and spices in food as well as cinnamon, drink green tea as well as apple cider vinegar, not have any trans fats, and have more supplements, such as chromium, magnesium, berberine, and resveratrol. Other important foods to eat are non-starch vegetables, tomatoes, citrus fruits, whole grains, foods with a high amount of protein, fish with high omega-3 fatty acids, foods with antioxidants, sweet potatoes, unsweetened tea, and unsweetened yogurt. Drinking water is also important. The goal of having these foods is to decrease your blood sugar and your glucose so that it is easier for insulin to do its job and relieves the pancreas the toll of having to produce an excess amount of insulin, which may affect its efficiency, thus, making the body less resistant to insulin. 

There is a correlation between the food items taken by individuals and their chances to receive insulin resistance. For example, a sample of 1,396 men and 1,436 women from the Attica region of Greece had their food habits and patterns studied. It had been shown that there was a direct correlation between red meat consumption and hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia (p = 0.04), as well as HOMA levels. This means that not taking the natural foods stated above, such as vegetables and fruits, particularly colored ones, whole grains, antioxidant foods, ect. and instead replacing it with more red meat like foods can increase the chances of receiving insulin resistance. In a study of the correlation between sleep apnea and insulin resistance from a sample of 270 people, those with more severe sleep apnea had higher levels of insulin, suggesting that their body may have had to make more because of excess glucose (p = 0.001), had more glucose levels by a modest amount (p = 0.001), and had higher HOMA-IR levels (p < 0.001). This shows that more sleep can reduce insulin resistance as well. In a study on the effects of spice consumption, those who had chili meals had lower glucose levels and lower insulin levels, indicating that their body had to produce less insulin to suffice for the lower amount of glucose in their body, and those that had chili after a bland meal (without chili), were able to have more energy expenditure. This thus shows that chili is another factor that can cause lower insulin resistance.

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