Insulin resistance: An adaptive mechanism becomes maladaptive in the current environment—An evolutionary perspective

In the citing paper

“All organisms have physiological adaptive responses to deal with changing environmental conditions (starvation, fasting, physical threat, stress and infection) and the varying demands of internal physiological states (pregnancy, lactation and adolescence) [14,65].”

In the citing paper

“Multiple lines of evidence support the maladaptive response of human populations to rapidly changing nutritional, physical, psychological and cultural environments, in the modern world [5,11,14,75].”

In the citing paper

“Details of the mechanisms underlying the proposed adaptive survival advantages of IR, hyperandrogenism, enhanced energy storage and subfertility have been obtained from paleolithic records, animal models and human populations exposed to adverse environmental conditions such as war and famine-inflicted starvation [14,16,62,63].”

In the citing paper

“Theories of evolutionary mismatch have also been advanced to explain all of the cluster of metabolic diseases associated with PCOS (type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, NAFLD and cardiovascular disease) and follow the same set of basic principles and explanations [14,76].”

In the citing paper

“One common theme is that PCOS may be viewed as a “conditional phenotype” where a specific set of conditions has unmasked normally unexpressed or partly expressed genetic pathways, which then provide a survival advantage under certain environmental conditions [14,16].”

In the citing paper

“A unified evolutionary theory of the pathogenesis of PCOS proposes that ancient genetic polymorphisms that were aligned with the environment of that era, resulted in an adaptive survival advantage in offspring in ancestral populations [14,15,16,28].”

In the citing paper

“In addition, the susceptibility alleles may be “activated” or “functionally enhanced” by a range of maternal and environmental factors, as is usually presumed to be the case in PCOS [5,14,102].”

In the citing paper

“In evolutionary terms, women with a PCOS metabolic phenotype would have increased survival chances during times of environmental or physiological demand for altered energy metabolism, but be more vulnerable to the pathological effects of IR when exposed to modern lifestyle factors [14,17,159].”

In the citing paper

“This allows free fatty acids to be mobilized from adipose tissue, which are then converted to glucose in the liver and released into the circulation [161]. As a result of this metabolic change, blood sugar levels are maintained for vital metabolic processes and brain function [14].”

In the citing paper

“Lower body SAT has a metabolic program that makes it less readily available for every-day energy needs, but it can be mobilized during pregnancy and lactation [14].”

In the citing paper

“The lower body distribution of SAT in women is hypothesized to have evolved to provide additional calorie storage for pregnancy and lactation and is unique to human females [14].”