Abstract

Hepatitis C virus infection, besides its substantial unfavorable impact on liver health, has several other manifestations, from which we have focused on its associations with insulin resistance and diabetes mellitus in an in vitro setting in this review of the literature. Several epidemiologic studies have already proven the strong association between chronic HCV infection and development of diabetes mellitus. However, attempts to clarifying molecular mechanisms for this association have not made up until recent years. We made a comprehensive review of the literature but we only found 6 studies investigating HCV impact on insulin signaling pathway in an in vitro era. We tried to review and compare the findings of these studies to show what we already know on the issue and what we still need to know. © 2014 Asian Network for Scientific Information.