What is prediabetes?
admin | Jan 10, 2011 | Comments 0
This term is used a lot these days, but I am not sure how useful it is.
It can easily be misused. The term has become popular in the media and with drug companies who make drugs that might delay the
onset of diabetes. Labeling people as having prediabetes certainly
gets their attention! It suggests that we have a perfect crystal ball and
can know ahead of time that someone is going to get diabetes. Once
you know that someone has diabetes, you can certainly look back
and say that, during the time before he or she got diabetes, he or she
had “prediabetes.” I suppose you could also say that while we are
alive, we are all in a state of “predeath.” The term prediabetes implies
that we can identify people and know for sure that they are going to
develop diabetes in the future. If people have a strong family history
of diabetes and have been tested and were found to have impaired
glucose tolerance, then they are certainly at much higher risk of
getting diabetes in the future unless they can change something. But
it is presumptuous to say that they have “prediabetes.”
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