Protein may help predict diabetes risk, study says
WASHINGTON - A protein made in the liver may give doctors a way to predict years in advance who is at high risk for the most common form of diabetes, a study published yesterday said.
Studying people in their 70s, researchers found those with high levels of a protein known as fetuin-A were far more likely than those with low levels to develop Type 2 diabetes over the six years of the study.
Fetuin-A is made by liver cells and may be involved in the metabolism of the sugar glucose as well as calcium, the researchers said. Type 2 diabetes, which is closely linked to obesity, is marked by high levels of glucose, the body's source of energy, in the blood.
But not all obese people develop diabetes and scientists are eager to determine who might be at particular risk for diabetes, which can damage the eyes, kidneys, and nerves and lead to heart disease, stroke, and limb amputation.
"It might ultimately be useful to use this [fetuin-A] for screening and identifying people at higher risk for diabetes," Joachim Ix, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego who led the study, said in a phone interview.
"It might be that using medications that control glucose earlier might actually prevent diabetes in those people," said Ix, who also works in the San Diego Veterans Affairs Healthcare System. "It might be that if you identify people at higher risk, they may be more motivated to do things like diet and exercise that are known to be important in preventing development of diabetes."
Of the 519 people in the study, those in the highest third for blood levels of the protein were about 2- 1/2times as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than those in the lowest third, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The link between levels of the protein and diabetes risk remained even when factoring out weight, exercise, sex, or race, the researchers said.
Ix said that fetuin-A, which makes the body less sensitive to insulin, also could be the target of future drugs aimed at preventing or treating diabetes. Ix said it is likely that blood levels of fetuin-A might also help to predict diabetes in middle-aged people.
