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Received Oct 24, 2017; Revised Dec 28, 2017; Accepted Jan 8, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Diabetes mellitus (DM) has become a severe public health problem globally, as every 6 seconds a person dies from diabetes [1]. Impaired glucose regulation (IGR), including both impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and impaired fasting glycaemia (IFG) [2], has a high risk to develop as DM [3, 4] and shared many common pathologic mechanisms with DM, such as insulin resistance, β-cell dysfunction, and chronic inflammation.
The adipose tissue is not only a place to store fat but also considered as an endocrine organ secreting adipokines, which participate in the pathologic processes of DM and IGR. Perturbations in these adipokines can cause pathological alteration in glucose metabolism, often with severe consequences. Asprosin, a novel adipokine found by Romere et al. in 2016, is the C-terminal cleavage product of profibrillin (encoded by FBN1) [5]. It is secreted by the white adipose tissue and targets the liver to fasting-responsive increase plasma glucose and insulin levels [5]. Previous study showed a pathological elevation of asprosin in human and mice with insulin resistance, and its loss of function via immunologic or genetic methods has a profound glucose- and insulin-lowering effect in mice [5]. In addition, asprosin was reported to activate the G protein-cAMP-PKA axis in the liver [5], which has been demonstrated to have an amelioration effect on chronic inflammation [6, 7]. All these results suggested asprosin may play a role in glucose metabolism, whereas no direct data are available for the role of circulating asprosin in type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and IGR subjects. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional study to evaluate the plasma asprosin concentrations in normal glucose regulation (NGR), newly diagnosed T2DM (nT2DM), and IGR subjects and analyze its correlation with metabolic parameters and inflammation.
2. Methods
2.1. Study Subjects
One hundred and forty-three Chinese subjects aged 27 to 75 years were recruited in our study. According to the diagnostic criteria of WHO in 1998, that is, for DM, fasting plasma glucose (FPG) value ≥ 7.0 mmol/L or 2 h postglucose challenge (2hPG) ≥ 11.1 mmol/L or both; for IGR,...