Caution Urged for HOMA-IR

摘要

A new report summarizing data from 36 healthy dogs undergoing diet-induced insulin resistance (IR) not only showed that when used to quantify IR, the homeostatic model assessment of IR (HOMA-IR) performed poorly relative to both clamp and intravenous glucose tolerance testing (IVGTT), it also revealed that HOMA-IR actually showed improvements in IR in more than one-third of the dogs in the study as a result of measurement artifact. The article by Ader et al. in this month's issue of Diabetes (p. 1914) sheds light on the potentially widespread implications of using HOMA-IR in research settings in which insulin secretion is either unclear or diminished. After 2-3 weeks of baseline testing, the dogs were fed a high-fat diet over a 6-week period. At baseline and 6 weeks, the dogs underwent clamps and IVGTT, and HOMA-IR was also calculated from measures of fasting glucose and insulin.