About Prediabetes
How will you know if you have prediabetes?
You probably won’t know. There are no outward major symptoms to alert you to the possibility. But it is important that you find out.
So unless you go to a doctor for any reason and the decision is made for you to have a blood test, it is not likely you will discover whether the answer is yes or no. And yet having prediabes and not knowing about it puts you, or whoever has that condition, at high risk for a number of health problems, especially of a cardiovascular nature. The facts are well known, medical studies confirm that to be the case.
About the blood test
On a personal note, I wish everyone would have a blood test at least once a year just as their blood pressure should be monitored. The blood test is a simple procedure of obtaining a small sample of blood taken from the arm by a technician in a health clinic, the sample is then sent to a laboratory specializing in blood analysis. The procedure takes but a moment or two, I know, I’ve had dozens perhaps hundreds taken over the last twenty years. Only with the results in hand can the doctor really know the significance of important factors about the condition of my body and my health – or your body and your health.
The advantage of having a blood test as a diagnostic tool is that it can provide an alert if the results of the test show any abnormality in such things as cholesterol, triglycerides, urine, liver residues, and other important substances normally carried in the bloodstream, including of course, glucose. The hope is that your results will prove to show that you have normal blood sugar levels, and if you do, that is wonderful.
What is prediabetes?
Perhaps it sounds unimportant, prediabetes is really just the condition of not having normal blood sugar levels in the circulation system. That is it. Everything defining prediabetes and diabetes is connected with blood sugars that remain consistently high for too long a period compared to what is considered normal in the human body.
Without explaining here in detail but for the record, I should say that specifically defined, prediabetes exists when a person’s fasting blood glucose level is in the range from 110 to 124 mg/dL (6.1 to 6.9 mmol/L). That is below the level at which diabetes would be diagnosed. Fasting blood sugar levels are those most often measured after an overnight period of 8 to 12 hours without food or drink, in other words from after an evening meal and before breakfast.
There is also a test called a Glucose Tolerance Test that can determine the prediabetes or diabetic condition. This test measures the amount glucose that remains in the blood over a time period of several hours after drinking a quantity of liquid glucose.
Glucose, an essential nutrient
The sugars, more formally called glucose, a specific form of sugar, is essential for the billions of cells of the human body for use as a source of energy. The glucose arrives in the bloodstream after digestion of food in the stomach when that food, especially the carbohydrate portion of the food, is broken down to its minute nutrient constituents and is passed through the intestine wall to enter the blood stream to be carried everywhere throughout the body.
However, the higher than normal blood sugar levels found in prediabetes present an increased risk for the development of cardiovascular conditions and when neglected, perhaps because of not being aware of having prediabetes, it can lead to type-2 diabetes proper, considered by most doctors as being an incurable disease with vastly increased risk of not only vascular disease but many other serious and life threatening complications that might lead in extreme cases to blindness, liver disease, limb amputation and a few other severely damaging outcomes.
An indicator, body weight
But without a blood test or until one is made, there is one factor that is important to consider because it may be an indicator, and that is body weight. It is well known that most people who suffer from the main form of diabetes, known as type-2 diabetes, are overweight, many excessively. And so too are a large number of the general population and those who are overweight should be especially concerned and become informed about both prediabetes and diabetes. The overweight people are a large percentage of that population who do not know they have prediabetes.
Prevention is possible
But if you are overweight and do have prediabetes, further development to diabetes can be prevented or significantly delayed. Clinical trials have shown that the risk of diabetes can be reduced by very achievable lifestyle modifications in dietary changes and an increase in physical activity, and if required, medication. The Canadian Diabetes Association reports that studies confirm that possibility.
Conclusion
So knowing the risks, knowing that it can be prevented, now it is time to find out whether you have prediabetes, like so many others, who we are informed by the CDC, have prediabetes but as of now they are unaware of that fact.
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