Fasting Insulin: An Important Bio-marker

After eating your pancreas produces a hormone called insulin to help move glucose from your blood into your cells. If your body is experiencing insulin resistance, your body’s cells in the muscles, fat, and liver do not respond to the insulin effectively and therefore the pancreas produces more insulin to help the glucose enter the cells. As long as your pancreas is able to keep up with this demand your glucose levels will not be elevated. This is why I love using a fasting insulin lab test to be a better determinant of metabolic health as it can “catch” problems earlier than a fasting glucose or hemoglobin A1c.

We know that obesity and PCOS are two factors that increase one’s risk for insulin resistance.

How does obesity play a role in insulin resistance as well as inflammation?

Obesity results in increase of adipose tissue and adipocyte size which can lead to an inflammatory response.
The inflammatory response includes increased production and release of pro-inflammatory cytokines/chemokines and the recruitment of highly inflammatory bone marrow–derived macrophages.
Activation of these macrophages promotes the recruitment and infiltration of additional macrophages into adipose tissue.
This results in insulin resistance in adipocytes and liver, exacerbation of the inflammatory state, and systemic insulin resistance.
With obesity, there is also increased fat accumulation within skeletal muscle, and these intermuscular fat depots become infiltrated with proinflammatory macrophages, which may cause insulin resistance in skeletal muscle.

In addition increased stress causes deep abdominal fat deposits which secrete inflammatory cytokines that promote insulin resistance and the cardiovascular complications of metabolic syndrome.

Insulin resistance is also likely the underlying cause of PCOS, an endocrine disorder.