Diagnosing the predisposition for diabetes mellitus by means of mid-IR spectroscopy

The vicious circle of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia is considered to precede the manifestation of diabetes type-2 by decades and the corresponding cluster of risk factors is described as the 'insulin resistance syndrome' or 'metabolic syndrome'. Since the present diagnosis of insulin resistance is expensive, time consuming and cumbersome, there is a need for diagnostic alternatives. We conducted a clinical study on 129 healthy volunteers and 99 patients suffering from the metabolic syndrome. We applied mid-infrared spectroscopy to dried serum samples from these donors and evaluated the spectra by means of disease pattern recognition (DPR). Substantial differences were found between the spectra originating from healthy volunteers and those spectra originating from patients with the metabolic syndrome. A linear discriminant analysis was performed using approximately one half of the sample set for teaching the classification algorithm. Within this teaching set, a classification sensitivity and specificity of 84 percent and 81 percent respectively can be derived. Furthermore, the resulting discriminant function was applied to an independent validation of the remaining half of the samples. For the discrimination between 'healthy' and 'metabolic syndrome' a sensitivity and a specificity of 80 percent and 82 percent respectively is obtained upon validating the algorithm with the independent validation set.