The relationship between components of metabolic syndrome and plasma level of sex hormone-binding globulin

Abstract

Plasma concentration of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), as an androgen binding protein, is impressed by many physiological and environmental factors. Recent studies have shown that plasma level of SHBG is related to some components of metabolic syndrome (MetS); however, in contrast, few articles failed to show any associations between SHBG and MetS. So, this study was conducted to investigate the relationship between Components of Metabolic Syndrome and Plasma Level of Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin. In this study, after measuring the plasma level of SHBG in 84 individuals, the relation between MetS and the plasma level of SHBG was investigated. After evaluating the plasma level of SHBG and metabolic abnormalities in men and women, we investigated the factors which mentioned above in two groups including patients with and without MetS. Also, the metabolic abnormalities which evaluated in this study including plasma level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, serum uric acid (SUA), Albumin, lipid profiles and etc. according to five components of MetS. Our result shows that SHBG could contributed to some laboratory parameters such as LDL-C (P<0.05), total cholesterol (P<0.05), triglycerides (P<0.05) and etc. in men, but not in women. On the other hand, we observed that concentration of SHBG is higher in patients with MetS (P<0.05); however, results from our experiment showed that there is no relation between lower level of SHBG and five components of MetS such as central obesity, raised fasting plasma glucose (FPG) (P>0.05), reduced HDL-C (P>0.05), raised triglycerides (P>0.05) and raised blood pressure (P>0.05) in both men and women. There is a significant association between SHBG and Log-Hip Circumference (P<0.05), Non-HDL-C (P<0.05) and Log-25(OH)D (P<0.05) was seen in this cross-section study in both men and women. Results obtained from our study suggest that SHBG is not a powerful enough factor to use as a predictor of MetS alone and there is no association between plasma level of SHBG and development of five components of MetS, however, lower SHBG level may contributed to lipid profiles.