Trunk Fat Linked to Insulin Resistance

Upper trunk fat — fat on the chest and back — is associated with an increased risk of insulin resistance, a San Francisco VA Medical Center study found.

In insulin resistance, cells in the body become increasingly resistant to the action of insulin, a hormone that regulates blood glucose levels. The result is chronically high blood glucose, which has many adverse health effects, said principal investigator Dr. Carl Grunfeld.

The subjects were part of a national long-term longitudinal study of HIV infected people taking modern anti-retroviral therapy and HIV negative controls. The researchers found the association was equally strong in both HIV infected subjects and HIV negative subjects.

We knew about the insulin resistance risk associated with visceral fat — located between and around the internal organs — but no one had ever looked at the contribution of upper trunk fat, Grunfeld said in a statement.

Among the HIV infected subjects with the highest levels of upper trunk fat, 57 percent showed insulin resistance; of those, half lacked high visceral fat and among those who didn’t have HIV, those with the highest levels of upper trunk fat, 61 percent were insulin resistant.

The findings are published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.