Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Labelling people with moderately high blood sugar as pre-diabetic is a drastically premature measure with no medical value and huge financial and social costs, say researchers from UCL and the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota.
The analysis, published in the BMJ, considered whether a diagnosis of pre-diabetes carried any health benefits such as improved diabetes prevention. The authors showed that treatments to reduce blood sugar only delayed the onset of type 2 diabetes by a few years, and found no evidence of long-term health benefits.
Type 2 diabetes is typically diagnosed with a blood test that measures levels of haemoglobin A1c, which indicates average blood sugar level over the last three months. People with an A1c over 6.5% can be diagnosed with diabetes but the latest guidelines from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) define anyone with an A1c between 5.7% and 6.4% as having pre-diabetes.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-07-pre-diabetes-unhelpful-unnecessary.html
The analysis, published in the BMJ, considered whether a diagnosis of pre-diabetes carried any health benefits such as improved diabetes prevention. The authors showed that treatments to reduce blood sugar only delayed the onset of type 2 diabetes by a few years, and found no evidence of long-term health benefits.
Type 2 diabetes is typically diagnosed with a blood test that measures levels of haemoglobin A1c, which indicates average blood sugar level over the last three months. People with an A1c over 6.5% can be diagnosed with diabetes but the latest guidelines from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) define anyone with an A1c between 5.7% and 6.4% as having pre-diabetes.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-07-pre-diabetes-unhelpful-unnecessary.html