About NIRC

            The non-profit National Insulin Resistance Council (NIRC) has one purpose: to prevent millions of non-infectious disease cases tied to, and probably caused by insulin resistance. 

            Research has shown that non-infectious disease cases linked to insulin resistance, while dreadful, are preventable.  These include diabetes, alone the sixth leading cause of US adult deaths and the leading cause of all blindness, kidney failure and amputations.  Insulin resistance is implicated in half the cases of heart disease, the number one cause of adult deaths. 

            NIRC believes that early identification of insulin resistant individuals and focused active prevention will spare individuals and society the medical and financial burden of preventable disease.  NIRC sponsors, operates, and collaborates with others on medical and economic assessment and communications programs that lead to: 

• Broader clinical awareness and understanding and improved practices relating to early identification of insulin resistance.
• Catalyze constructive public policy debate about early identification of insulin resistant individuals and active prevention programs.
• Collaborate with victim and disease oriented organizations like the American Heart and Diabetes Associations to achieve broad prevention objectives.
• Encourage research to learn how insulin resistance starts, operates, can be detected more easily and earlier, and how it induces various non-infectious diseases.

            Why are early identification of insulin resistance and active prevention of non-infectious diseases important?  Insulin resistance is genetically coded, but activated by behavior.  Once active, it silently and relentlessly causes vascular and nerve tissue destruction.  Current medical practice, insurance rules and public policies tend to ignore insulin resistance prior to the emergence of significant symptoms, and sometimes even then.  Because its effects are gradual and cumulative, symptoms such as infertility, hypertension, obesity, metabolic syndrome, PCOS, and pre-diabetes emerge years after much damage is done.  The even more serious outcomes of diabetes, stroke and heart disease can take decades to appear. 

            Research has shown that even the more serious outcomes are preventable, if not for a lifetime, at least for years.  Why wouldn’t we want to do that in an organized way?