Or does labeling people prediabetic merely “medicalize” a normal part of aging, creating needless anxiety for those already coping with multiple health problems?ĭr. Should older people with slightly above-normal blood sugar readings - a frequent occurrence since the pancreas produces less insulin in later life - be taking action, as the American Diabetes Association has urged? Those fearful consequences take years to develop, and many people in their 70s and 80s will not live long enough to encounter them.
It causes heart attack and stroke,” he said.īut for an older adult just edging into higher blood sugar levels, it’s a different story. “It damages your kidneys, your eyes and your nerves. Kenneth Lam, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of an editorial accompanying the study. It is commonly defined by a hemoglobin A1C reading of 5.7 to 6.4 percent or a fasting glucose level of 100 to 125 mg/dL in midlife, it can portend serious health problems.Ī diagnosis of prediabetes means that you are more likely to develop diabetes, and “that leads to downstream illness,” said Dr. Prediabetes, a condition rarely discussed as recently as 15 years ago, refers to a blood sugar level that is higher than normal but that has not crossed the threshold into diabetes. “In most older adults, prediabetes probably shouldn’t be a priority,” said Elizabeth Selvin, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the senior author on the study.
And they were no more likely to die during the follow-up period than their peers with normal blood sugar. The researchers found that over several years, older people who were supposedly prediabetic were far more likely to have their blood sugar levels return to normal than to progress to diabetes. A longitudinal study of older adults, published online this month in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, provides some answers about the very common in-between condition known as prediabetes.
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