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25 Percent of People Have Diabetes or Prediabetes

November 10th, 2011 by Ryan Luce No Comments

written by Michael O’Leary

Dr. Mona Boaz

More people may be walking around with pre-type 2 diabetes and don’t know it than had been thought. Finding them is considered key to stepping up prevention efforts.

Almost a quarter of the people who underwent free screenings were found to have prediabetes or full-blown type 2 diabetes researchers in Israel reported at this week’s World Congress on Insulin Resistance, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease meeting.

MedPage Today reported on the conference this week in Los Angeles detailing the findings of a group of researchers led by Dr. Mona Boaz of the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel. (Link to published site)

She told MedPage that they were astounded that among the 1,173 people who underwent the free screening, more than 21.1 percent of the people screened had impaired glucose tolerance and 4.3 percent were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Boaz and colleagues were prompted to do the screenings because of the rising prevalence of obesity and the urgent need for diabetes prevention, particularly in terms of changing lifestyles. To determine the number of people with undiagnosed prediabetes they decided to set up a free screening station at their hospital using trained volunteers to measure height and weight, blood glucose, and blood pressure. In addition, participants were asked if they had ever been diagnosed with diabetes.

Among the 1,401 participants with an average age of 53, 228 said they knew they had diabetes and 136 reported having high blood pressure.  Among the remaining 1,173 participants who did not know their diabetes status, the screeners found 247 (21.1 percent) with dysglycemia, a marker for prediabetes, and 50 participants (4.3 percent) with full-blown type 2 diabetes and did not know it.

They also found that compared with those who had normal blood glucose, those who had prediabetes were significantly older, had significantly higher blood glucose, higher body mass index (BMI), and higher blood pressure. Those newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes had significantly higher blood sugar levels than non-diabetics, but they didn’t differ significantly in terms of age, BMI or blood pressure.

Boaz said the results suggest that the true number of people with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes and prediabetes in the Israeli population may be higher than current estimates. She cautioned, however, that those who decided to participate in the free screening program were already at the hospital, so it is possible they might also have had suspicions about their risk for diabetes and opted for the screening. Scientists call this a self-selection bias and is likely to inflate the number of cases found.

She added that in a repeat of the screening effort with 4,000 participants that they haven’t completed, the rate of prediabetes has been running lower at about 17 percent.

Boaz and colleagues conclude that early detection doesn’t have to occur in an expensive screening program and has the potential to ultimately reduce morbidity and mortality related to diabetes.