Photo Credit: Alejandro Franco Garcia

Researchers observed higher insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE) levels in patients with T2DM, compared with patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy controls after adjustment for sex and age. Helena Kullenberg and colleagues conducted a study of 120 individuals (47 with T2DM, 9 with AD, and 64 healthy controls), which was published in Endocrine. Using ELISA, they measured serum levels of IDE. Between groups, the researchers assessed differences in IDE levels with non-parametric ANCOVA and used Spearman’s rank correlations to analyze correlations. Kullenberg and colleagues examined the influence of sex, age, and insulin use on the correlation via a non-parametric version of partial correlation. They also observed that IDE was increasingly linked with BMI, fasting blood glucose, A1C, C-peptide, triglycerides, and insulin resistance. Additionally, in patients with AD, the researchers found a lessening partial association between IDE and A1C, as well as a decreasing partial correlation between IDE and C-peptide in healthy controls. No partial correlations were observed in patients with T2DM.