Expression of leptin mRNA as non-invasive biomarker in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Leptin, an adipocyte-derived signalling molecule that plays important role in the regulation of energy balance, body weight and glucose metabolism.

To evaluate leptin mRNA expression as a predictive biomarker in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).

To detect the expression patterns of leptin mRNA, a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was performed on samples collected from 71 T2DM patients and 32 non-diabetic controls. The receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was utilised to assess the discriminatory power of leptin mRNA.

Leptin mRNA levels were reduced significantly in diabetic patients compared with non-diabetic controls (P ≤ .0001). The ROC curve analysis showed a significant association between leptin mRNA levels and T2DM (P ≤ .0001), with a high area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.95 (95% CI: 0.89-0.98). The analysis also showed that fasting blood glucose and glycosylated haemoglobin had high AUC values of 0.88 and 0.97 with (95% CI: 0.80-0.93 and 0.92-0.99), respectively.

This study shows that the reduced leptin mRNA expression level is significantly associated with T2DM and could be used as a predictive and diagnostic biomarker for T2DM.