Research

Hormonal

In lean women, insulin action declines with age specifically due to impaired suppression of free fatty acids (FFAs), which leads to substrate competition where FFAs are oxidized instead of glucose.

If you are a lean woman, be aware that your insulin sensitivity may decline with age due to how your body handles fat acids, not just weight gain. This is a specific biological mechanism (substrate competition) rather than just 'getting old'. Monitoring body composition and metabolic health is important even if your BMI remains low.

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In the subgroup of lean women in whom insulin action declined with age, adding FFA suppression to a multiple regression equation canceled the association between age and insulin action.
Eleuterio Ferrannini et al. · Diabetes · 1996

Why this rating

Large sample size (n=1,146) with a specific subset (n=92 lean women with FFA data) allowing for multivariate regression analysis.

Source

Insulin Action and Age: European Group for the Study of Insulin Resistance (EGIR)

Eleuterio Ferrannini et al. · Diabetes · 1996

DOI 10.2337/diab.45.7.947

cross_sectional · n=1146Cited 334×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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