A 2022 study published in the journal Endocrinology reported short-term lifestyle changes can affect the blood vessel’s sensitivity to insulin and these alterations affect men and women differently. Researchers observed the insulin resistance in 36 young and healthy men and women by not only cutting down their physical activity from 10,000 steps a day to 5,000 steps but also increasing their sugar intake to six cans of soda per day. Insulin resistance is a feature of obesity and type 2 diabetes that leads to vascular disease.
The results showed that only in men was there a decrease in insulin-stimulated leg blood flow and a drop in a protein called adropin. Adropin is known to control insulin sensitivity and is an important biomarker for cardiovascular disease. This is the first real documentation of evidence in humans that vascular insulin resistance can be triggered by short-term adverse lifestyle changes, and it's the first proof we have of sex-related differences in the development of vascular insulin resistance in association with changes in adropin levels.
Next, researchers and doctors would like to further investigate how long it takes to reverse these vascular and metabolic changes and assess the impact of sex in the development of vascular insulin-resistance.