Susceptibility to insulin resistance in indigenous Australians may be down stream of resistin

Obesity is thought to be a major risk factor for the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, not all obese or insulin resistant individuals develop T2DM suggesting additional factors are required to cause disease. In order to identify additional mechanisms leading to insulin resistance and T2DM, we measured plasma adipokines as well as established biochemical risk factors for developing T2DM in a large indigenous Australian family. Results: We found T2DM individuals had higher insulin resistance (as measured by HOMA-IR) (p< 0.001), triglyceride (p= 0.003), cholesterol (p=0.02) and TNFα (p=0.03) levels than normoglycaemic controls, independent of age, gender and BMI. The alterations in insulin resistance could not be attributed to TNFα, as we did not find a correlation between TNFα and HOMA-IR in either normoglycaemic or T2DM individuals. In contrast, resistin correlated strongly to HOMA-IR in T2DM (p