The article, 'alpha-Hydroxybutyrate is an early biomarker of insulin resistance and glucose intolerance in a nondiabetic population’, which was co-authored by physicians and scientists from the European Group for the Study of Insulin Resistance (EGIR) and Metabolon, appears on the PLoS One website.

Biochemical profiling technology was deployed on plasma samples from 399 non-diabetic subjects from EGIR’s prospective Relationship between Insulin Sensitivity and Cardiovascular Disease (RISC) cohort, representing a broad spectrum of insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance.

Alpha-hydroxybutyrate was the statistically top-ranked biochemical for classifying subjects as insulin resistant or insulin sensitive. Commenting on the study results, senior RISC author Ele Ferrannini, M.D. summarized, ‘From this unbiased, biochemical screen, alpha-hydroxybutyrate, an intermediate metabolite of amino acid metabolism, was the strongest biochemical that marks as a single metabolic fingerprint of in vivo human insulin resistance’.

Insulin resistance is an abnormal metabolic condition and a recognized clinical predictor of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, with an association with obesity, certain cancers and other metabolic diseases. Metabolon is currently developing a fasted plasma diagnostic test for insulin resistance to enable physicians to more accurately assess their at-risk patient population.

As described in the article, alpha-hydroxybutyrate and other metabolites have been identified as a metabolic signature of insulin resistance.