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Updated: Dec 21, 2025
Electrochemiluminescence Assays for Human Islet Autoantibodies
Published on: March 23, 2018
Immunoglobulin free light chains: an inflammatory biomarker of diabetes
Akira Matsumori1, Toshio Shimada2, Miho Shimada3
1Clinical Research Center, Kyoto Medical Center, 1-1 Fukakusa Mukaihata-cho, Fushimi-ku, Kyoto, 612-8555, Japan. amat@kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp.
Objective:
Inflammation is increasingly understood as playing an important role in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) development. A critical mechanism of the inflammatory cascade in developing T2D is nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-kB) activation. As immunoglobulin free light chains (FLC) could be a biomarker of activation of NF-kB, we measured FLC in patients with T2D.
Subjects:
The age range of the 77 patients with T2D and the 75 healthy control participants were 45-87 years (median 60) and 25-72 years (median 51), respectively.
Methods:
Serum FLC kappa and lambda were assayed by a competitive-inhibition multiplex Luminex assay.
Results:
The concentration of circulating FLC the kappa/lambda ratio was lower in patients with T2D than in healthy volunteers. The area under the receiver operating curve (ROC-AUC) of the FLC kappa/lambda ratio showed the largest ROC-AUC compared with other FLC variables and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). The diagnostic performance for distinguishing between T2D and healthy control was a sensitivity of 0.96 and a specificity of 1. The odds ratio was 0.000018.
Conclusions:
These results suggest that FLC kappa/lambda may be more specific and sensitive for the diagnosis of T2D than HbA1c, and thus represents a potentially promising biomarker of inflammation.
