Full Length Research Paper

Obesity as risk factor and study of obesity related proteins in diabetes mellitus

Samreen Riaz¹, Saadia Shahzad Alam², Mehreen Raza¹, Shahida Hasnain¹ and M. Waheed Akhtar³

¹Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of the Punjab, Lahore, 54590 Pakistan.

²Federal Post Graduate Medical Institute, Shaikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan.

³School of Biological Sciences, Punajb University, Lahore. Pakistan.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: samreen@mmg.pu.edu.pk

Accepted 2 February, 2009

Obesity is one of the leading cause of diabetes mellitus in the world population due to the growing trend of sedentary lifestyle and increased food consumption of high caloric diet. A concomitant increase due to this has been observed in coronary heart diseases, hypertension and even diabetes. High lipid profile of the serum is one of the factors that may result in the development of obesity in diabetes mellitus and thus the progression of diabetes. This study was carried out to determine the effect of various physical and biochemical parameters of obesity to ascertain the link to presence and severity of diabetes. For this purpose physical parameters such as BMI, waist circumference, and biochemical parameters such as FBS, glycated HbA1c, albumin excretion rate, urine creatinine level, and lipid profile parameters such as cholesterol, triglyceride, HDL, LDL and VLDL were measured by standard referred protocols. Elevated serum leptin level was associated with components of the metabolic syndrome, including increased body-mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, serum triglyceride levels, fasting blood sugar, glyacated HbA1c, total serum proteins and decreased high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in obese diabetes as compared to lean, non-obese and normal subjects. The results were found to be significant with p < 0.05. This study was also carried out to determine the risk factor of obesity in diabetes mellitus and found significant results in metabolic syndrome as physical and biochemical parameters are greater in obese diabetes as compared to non-obese diabetes group and also in lean. Proteins levels such as leptin are also greater in obese diabetes as compared to non-obese and lean objects.

Key words: Diabetes mellitus, obesity, leptin, SDS PAGE, MALDI TOF TOF.