CMHC Faculty Members

Faculty of Tarsus Medical Group are leaders in healthcare

Abhimanyu Garg

Abhimanyu Garg

MD

About

Abhimanyu Garg, M.D. is a professor of Internal Medicine and is Chief, Division of Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases at UT Southwestern. He is Director of Lipid Services at Parkland Memorial Hospital and UT Southwestern Internal Medicine Subspecialty Clinic. He is also Director of the Diabetes Clinic at the Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Dallas. He holds a Distinguished Chair in Human Nutrition Research. He is also the Director of Metabolic Diseases at the Center for Human Nutrition.

Dr. Garg's research has focused on the problems of nutrition for patients with diabetes and management of dyslipidemia in patients with type 2 diabetes. In addition, he has contributed to the understanding of the relationship of body fat distribution and insulin resistance. He has carefully characterized the phenotype of various disorders of adipose tissue, called lipodystrophies, which has led to discovery of many novel genes for these disorders

Dr. Garg's group identified deficiency of AGPAT2 enzyme, which is critical for triglyceride and phospholipid biosynthesis, as the cause of congenital generalized lipodystrophy, type 1. His group also linked peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gene, the key adipocyte differentiation transcription factor, to familial partial lipodystrophy. His team has also identified the second locus for mandibuloacral dysplasia, i.e., zinc metalloproteinase (ZMPSTE24), that is responsible for post translational processing of prelamin A to its mature form lamin A. Recently, he uncovered a novel autosomal recessive autoinflammatory syndrome that causes joint contractures, muscle atrophy, microcytic anemia, and panniculitis-induced lipodystrophy (JMP) and identified the defective gene as proteasome subunit, beta-type 8 (PSMB8) which encodes a subunit of the immunoproteasome responsible for generating immunogenic epitopes presented by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules.

He demonstrated that patients with generalized lipodystrophy have profound leptin deficiency and proposed that leptin deficiency might contribute to the metabolic complications in the disorder. This led him to initiate a collaborative trial with the NIDDK that demonstrated dramatic improvement in hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia, and fatty liver with leptin therapy.

Dr. Garg was a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and served as the Associate Editor, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism from 2004-2009.

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