Insulin resistance—when the body doesn’t properly respond to insulin, a hormone that helps control blood glucose levels—is one of the fundamental causes of diabetes. In addition to diabetes, it is widely known that insulin resistance can lead to cardiovascular, kidney and liver diseases. While insulin resistance is tightly associated with obesity, it has been difficult to evaluate insulin resistance itself in the clinic. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, applied a machine learning-based prediction model of insulin resistance to half a million participants from the UK Biobank and demonstrated that insulin resistance is a risk factor for 12 types of cancer.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

Diabetes is a common cause for concern around the world. Its connection to insulin resistance is a familiar concept to many, but what is less well known is that resistance to insulin is also suggested to be a risk factor for several cancers. However, the human body is a complex thing, and ascertaining causal connections between diseases and issues within the body is far from easy.