Research

Hormonal

Hyperinsulinemia acts as an upstream driver of the transition from MHO to MUO by promoting excessive fat accumulation and insulin resistance, and therapies that suppress insulin secretion (e.g., diazoxide, octreotide) may prevent this progression.

If you have MHO and high insulin levels, consider strategies to reduce insulin secretion. This may involve dietary changes (e.g., low carbohydrate, intermittent fasting) or, in some cases, medications that suppress insulin (like diazoxide or octreotide, though these are not standard first-line treatments). Discuss with your doctor whether your insulin levels are driving your metabolic risk.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Increasing evidence from pre-clinical and clinical studies support a view, at least in subsets of at-risk individuals, that hyper-responsiveness of the islet β-cell to a hostile environment (e.g., from a westernised lifestyle) drives hyperinsulinemia, and the hyperinsulinemia is upstream to excessive weight gain and MetS, including the development of IR. ... Pharmacological approaches with diazoxide or the somatostatin analogue octreotide-LAR to suppress insulin secretion in humans, also support the view that hyperinsulinemia may have more of a primary role in MetS.
Tenzin Dagpo et al. · Cells · 2020

Why this rating

Supported by pre-clinical models and human studies using insulin-suppressing drugs, though large-scale long-term trials are not detailed in this review.

Source

Exploring Therapeutic Targets to Reverse or Prevent the Transition from Metabolically Healthy to Unhealthy Obesity

Tenzin Dagpo et al. · Cells · 2020

DOI 10.3390/cells9071596

narrative_reviewCited 29×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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