LEP and nutritional deficiency disease: Furthermore, cytokine levels were compared according to nutritional status; as shown in Table 2, leptin (6.5 ng/ml vs 2.1 ng/ml, p=0.002) and free leptin (65.1 ng/ml vs 0.6 ng/ml, p=0.028) were higher in patients with obesity compared to those with malnutrition (Table 1).