What is Insulin Resistance and how it harms your body?
What is Insulin Resistance and how it
harms your body:
Insulin
Resistance simply means that your body is becoming resistant to your own
insulin. Insulin is a hormone produced by special cells in the pancreas.
It gets in blood circulation and affects the function of almost every
cell in the body.
In order to
understand Insulin Resistance consider this analogy. Imagine this room
as the cell, the hallway as the blood vessel and my receptionist as the
glucose molecule. Now my receptionist (glucose molecule) can travel thru
the hallway (blood vessel) and enter the room (cell), but only if the
door is open. In the body, insulin opens the door.
Insulin is the door man. If
the doors in the cell wall get rusty and therefore difficult to open, we
call it Insulin Resistance. In response to insulin resistance, your body
produces more and more insulin, sends more doormen.
This large
quantity of insulin keeps your blood sugar normal. But it is not good
for the rest of the body. It causes high blood pressure; it causes
narrowing of the blood vessels and sets up the stage for acute heart
attack and stroke. It causes growth of cancer; it also causes growth of
cysts in the ovaries in young women, a condition known as Polycystic
Ovarian Syndrome.
Obviously, there
are a lot of people out there with insulin resistance whose blood
glucose is perfectly normal and therefore no one thinks about insulin
resistance. Somehow there is this misconception that people with insulin
resistance have to have elevated blood glucose, which is not true at
all.
If insulin
resistance is left untreated, body's capacity to churn up huge amount of
insulin gets exhausted and then your blood glucose starts to rise.
Initially there is only mild rise in blood glucose, we call it
Pre-diabetes. Later there is higher elevation in blood glucose which we
call as diabetes.
Insulin
resistance also causes a high level of triglycerides and a low level of
HDL (good) cholesterol. These triglycerides then get deposited in the
liver, giving rise to a fatty
liver, which sometimes can lead to
cirrhosis of the liver.
In summary,
Insulin resistance is a harmful process in your body which gets worse
with the passage of time. When a person with insulin resistance consumes
excessive amounts of sugar and carbohydrates (which get converted to
sugar in the body), there is a huge load of sugar in the blood stream.
And body handles it by producing a large amount of insulin. This large
amount of insulin can keep your blood sugar normal but causes a lot of
harm to the rest of the body, as I explained earlier.
Early Detection and Treatment of
Insulin resistance is the Key to your health.
An overweight
person, especially around the waistline should have the following tests
to diagnose Insulin Resistance.
-
2-hour Oral Glucose Tolerance Test for the early detection of pre-diabetes and diabetes.
-
Blood insulin level.
-
Blood for HDL cholesterol (less than 50 mg/dl indicates Insulin Resistance)
-
Blood for triglycerides (more than 150 mg/dl indicates Insulin Resistance) IRS)
-
Blood pressure monitoring (more than 130/85 indicates Insulin Resistance)
Early intervention with the
Right diet, exercise,
stress management and
vitamin supplements can prevent development
of diabetes.
This article was written by Sarfraz Zaidi, MD, FACE. Dr. Zaidi
specializes in Diabetes,
Endocrinology
and Metabolism.
Dr. Zaidi is a former Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCLA. Currently he is Medical Director of the Jamila Diabetes and Endocrine Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California.
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