A pre-diabetic state in parents of overweight babies.

diabetes in man. The development of diabetes during treatment with cortisone and certicotropin.tion of temporary diabetes mellitus in man with pituitary adrenocorticotropic hormone; relation to uric acid metabolism. Insulin resistance may or may not be associated with the visible manifestations of allergy to insulin. Although the majority of patients with minor, transitory, allergic reactions to insulin are not noticeably resistant to insulin , one rightly looks for allergy to insulin as a possible cause of sever insulin resistance. In the last decade, the study of insulin resistance has been advanced by the application of several new methods. Lerman 1 and Lowell, 2-3 selecting patients because they were insulin resistant (with or without associated local allergy) have presented strong evidence for an immunologic mechanism. The same immunologic methods have indicated that antibodies to administered insulin may be produced in rabbits. 4 Insulin recrystallized six times is much less antigenic than commercial insulin 5 and the use of insulin prepared from human pancreas may be normally effective in the presence of resistance to the usual commercial insulin. 3 Such results indicate that the allergy to administered insulin is due either to some contamination of the protein hormone, or to differences in the actual structure of insulin from different sources, to which these few patients are susceptible. Further evidence of the part which allergy may play in insulin resistance has appeared since the control of allergic reactions by corticotropin (ACTH) has been possible. Howard 6 treated a patient, who had marked resistance and allergy to insulin, with corticotropin and was able to restore the patient to a stage of mild diabetes for which no insulin was needed. Sera of this and of other insulin resistant patients were examined for their effect on the action of insulin on the isolated rat diaphram. 7 There was striking inhibition of the effect of insulin in vitro by the sera of patients requiring 300 units of insulin per day or more. In the patient who had been treated with corticotropin, this inhibitory action of the serum was no longer present. Finally, Marsh and Haugaard 7 have shown that the serum of insulin resistant patients behaves differently from the hormones which inhibit the action of insulin in vitro. Thus in the presence of antibodies, less insulin is bound to the rat diaphragm: antagonistic hormones appear not to prevent this binding of insulin to tissue but to inhibit its …