Insulin resistance without an insulin test

Height, weight and three routine fasting blood tests. Two indexes help estimate whether your cells respond poorly to insulin. In a comparison of 18 indexes, METS-IR (metabolic score for insulin resistance) gave the highest accuracy for predicting diabetes among those calculated without insulin. If your tests include fasting insulin, look at it together with glucose: you can work out HOMA-IR in the HOMA-IR calculator on this site; the link is below the result. In a study of 6,538 British civil servants (505 cases of type 2 diabetes over about 10 years), insulin sensitivity fell noticeably over the 5 years before diagnosis, while fasting glucose rose sharply only in the last 3 years (Tabák AG Lancet 2009. PMID 19515410).