Circulating Oxidative Stress Biomarkers in Clinical Studies on Type 2 Diabetes and Its Complications

Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and its complications constitute a major worldwide public health problem, with high rates of morbidity and mortality. Biomarkers for predicting the occurrence and development of the disease may therefore offer benefits in terms of early diagnosis and intervention. This review provides an overview of human studies on circulating biomarkers of oxidative stress and antioxidant defence systems and discusses their usefulness from a clinical perspective. Most case-control studies documented an increase in biomarkers of oxidative lipid, protein, and nucleic acid damage in patients with prediabetes and in those with a diagnosis of T2DM compared to controls, and similar findings were reported in T2DM with micro- and macrovascular complications compared to those without. The inconsistence of the results regarding antioxidant defence systems renders difficulty to draw a general conclusion. The clinical relevance of biomarkers of oxidative lipid and protein damage for T2DM progression is uncertain, but prospective studies suggest that markers of oxidative nucleic acid damage such as 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine and 8-hydroxyguanosine are promising for predicting macrovascular complications of T2DM. Emerging evidence also points out the relationship between serum PON1 and serum HO1 in T2DM and its complications. Overall, enhanced oxidative damage represents an underlying mechanism of glucose toxicity in T2DM and its related micro- and macrovascular complications suggesting that it may be considered as a potential additional target for pharmacotherapy. Therefore, further studies are needed to understand whether targeting oxidative stress may yield clinical benefits. In this view, the measurement of oxidative stress biomarkers in clinical trials deserves to be considered as an additional tool to currently used parameters to facilitate a more individualized treatment of T2DM in terms of drug choice and patient selection.