Studies on the State of Insulin in Blood

Abstract

EXPERIMENTAL studies on the state of insulin in the blood of diabetic and nondiabetic human subjects led to the discovery that diabetes mellitus may result from extrapancreatic malfunction of the mechanism regulating insulin activity in blood, and not from a lack of endogenous insulin. This proposition is based on a series of investigations revealing that insulin circulates in the blood of diabetic subjects as a biologically inactive complex in amounts comparable or even higher to those found in nondiabetic subjects.^{1 , 2} It was also observed that the rate of dissociation of the insulin complexes in diabetic patients, after glucose administration, is . . .