You Can Prevent Diabetes

How you can prevent diabetes: Listen to doctors who urge you to exercise and lose weight. Don’t ignore prediabetes. Get support if you need it. 

It’s scary to hear that you have prediabetes.

When you have prediabetes, your body may not be making enough insulin after you eat to control your blood sugar level, or your body might not respond to insulin properly.

A test called hemoglobin A1C, which shows your average blood sugar level for the past 3 to 4 months, is often ordered during routine checkups, especially if you are older or overweight.

You’re home clear if your A1C score is 5.6 percent or less. A score of 5.7 to 6.4 percent puts you in the prediabetes range. At 6.5 percent or above you have diabetes. 

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If you hear that you have prediabetes, you’ve been given valuable information few people receive: More than one in American adults have glucose levels in that range, but more than 80 percent of them haven’t heard the news.

Prediabetes increases your risk of diabetes heart disease and stroke. Without some kind of change, many people with prediabetes will go on to develop type 2 diabetes within five years.

More than 11 percent of Americans — around 37 million — already have type 2 diabetes, which is the leading cause of kidney failure, blindness, and amputation, as well as a major cause of heart disease and stroke.

The risk factors include obesity, a family history of diabetes, lack of exercise, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. 

Most of the time, when doctors talk to you about your blood sugar, they simply tell you to lose weight and get more exercise.

If you’re A1C score falls in the prediabetes range, however, as it does for many Americans, you may want to ask your doctor about metformin  (Glucophage), the most common medication for diabetes.

A good deal of evidence from large, well-designed clinical trials supports the use of metformin to prevent diabetes. In 2007, the American Diabetes Association started recommending metformin for this purpose. It can aid weight loss, too, if you also eat less and exercise more. Some people, however, get diarrhea and other gastrointestinal side effects.

It may help to join an organized program for diabetes prevention. According to a report commissioned by the Community Preventive Services Task Force, people do much better in programs that provide coaching and support for at least 3 months.

The report reviewed 53 studies describing 66 combined diet and physical activity promotion programs, finding evidence that they boosted weight loss and led to lower blood sugar and better cholesterol markers.

“If you exercise and eat better, you’ll reduce your risk of developing diabetes,” said Patrick L. Remington, MD, MPH, coauthor of the recommendation statement on behalf of the task force. But when doctors simply tell “somebody to eat better and exercise, that does not work.”

In the task force survey, half of the participants paid less than $653 to take part in a prevention program. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps a registry of programs you can look up by state, as well as a list of virtual or online programs, including one from Jenny Craig, one of the better programs for weight loss, according to one study.

Be sure to check local private gyms, YMCAs, and community health centers.

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