I've written many times about how we need some new disease classifications, names or something for the various conditions that are currently termed "diabetes". This is because hyperglycemia -- the predominant symptom that garners a diabetes diagnosis -- can have many underlying physiological bases. In this post I'm going to make the same case for the pathologies lumped together under the term "insulin resistance" (from hereon, IR). The problem with discussions of IR are similar to those of diabetes. In a nutshell, hyperglycemia is to diabetes as glucose transport/disposal is to IR. Just as blood glucose is the myopic focus of many discussions of diabetes, so, too, insulin's role in glucose transport is the myopic focus of many discussions of IR.
Let's begin with a diagnosis of insulin resistance. The most commonly used single diagnostic parameter for this is something called the HOMA-IR. This ratio is determined from fasting plasma levels of insulin and glucose. From the link
HOMA-IR = (Glucose x Insulin)/22.5
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