STUDY OF SERUM VISFATIN LEVEL IN MALE AND FEMALE OBESITY

Abstract

Obesity has become one of the most important threats to human health worldwide. Abundant scientific evidence supports the associations between obesity and various disease including diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary artery disease, cancer, and sleep apnea. It should also be noted that the consequences of obesity extend beyond physical ailment and into the psychosocial as well as economic aspects of life. Visfatin, also known as pre B colony enhancing factor PBEF, is a cytokine that is highly expressed in visceral fat and was originally isolated as a secreted factor that synergizes with IL-7 and stem cell factors to promote the growth of B cell precursors. However, the biological activity of Visfastin is poorly understood it is secreted by activated lymphocytes, monocytes and neutrophils, it has been recently found that Visfatin expression in visceral fats is increased in obese subjects and that plasma concentrations of Visfatin correlated much more strongly with amount of visceral fat than that of adipose tissue. Our study is designed to investigate the serum levels of visfatin and its relationship to obesity in both male and female subjects without diabetes, in the present study showed significant higher serum visfatin levels in both obese male and female groups compared to healthy controls regardless to male or female type, this corresponds with the fact that visfatin is an adipokin secreted from the adipose tissue and this secretion is elevated relatively with the size of this tissue.