Fig. 1.

The impact of hepatic IRS2 expression on liver health status. (a) Hepatic IRS2 expression is significantly decreased in individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D; n = 31) in comparison with those without type 2 diabetes (ND; n = 50), independently of age, sex or BMI (p_a = 0.0417). Gene expression was normalised to the expression of a housekeeper gene and is shown as mean fold ± SEM relative to ND, as calculated by the $2^{-{\mathrm{∆∆}C}_t}$ method. (b, c) IRS2 expression correlates with liver steatosis and fibrosis status (NAS) (b; r = −0.2937, p_a = 0.0157; q = 0.0722; n = 68) and with serum concentration of ALT (c; r = −0.2403, p_a = 0.0143; q = 0.0722; n = 78). (d) Hepatic IRS2 expression correlates with HbA_1c values independently of age, sex and BMI (r = −0.2668, p_a = 0.0075; q = 0.0578; n = 68). In (c) and (d), reference values are indicated by dashed lines. Pearson’s correlation or Spearman’s correlation (p) and linear regression analysis (p_a) was used to calculate an association between gene expression (ΔC_t) and other parameters. For visualisation, gene expression was normalised by minimum (min)/maximum (max) normalisation (1 − (x_i − x_min)/(x_max − x_min)), to a scale from 0 (min expression) to 1 (max expression), whereby x_i is the current ΔCt value of a specific gene, x_min is the minimum ΔCt value of all measurements of a specific gene and x_max is the maximum ΔCt value of all measurements of a specific gene. Gene expression is shown as normalised expression on the axes. †p_a < 0.05