NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Lower serum levels of creatinine are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a brief report in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

The authors note that creatinine in serum is a direct indicator of total muscle mass. “Although skeletal muscle is one of the major targets of insulin,” write Dr. Tomoshige Hayashi, from Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan, and colleagues, “to our knowledge, no prospective study has investigated the association between total skeletal muscle mass and type 2 diabetes.”

The current investigation included 8570 men in the Kansai Healthcare Study, an ongoing project examining risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases. The participants were between 40 and 55 years of age and nondiabetic at entry.

Incident diabetes was diagnosed if fasting glucose levels reached 126 mg/dL or higher or if treatment with an oral hypoglycemic agent or insulin was initiated.

After 4 years of follow-up, 877 men were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. “The multiple-adjusted odds ratio for those who had serum creatinine between 0.40 and 0.60 mg/dL was 1.91 compared with those who had levels between 0.71 and 0.80 mg/dL,” the investigators report.

They conjecture that, because resistance training is known to cause muscular hypertrophy, it might be worth exploring whether such training could increase creatinine levels and thereby cut the risk of diabetes.

Reference:
Diabetes Care 2009;32:424-426.