Prediabetes

Do you have prediabetes? You might be able to ward it off with the help of one of the diabetes drugs.

Metformin might stop you from getting diabetes and could also help you in other ways. But persuading your doctor to prescribe it could be a challenge.

The biggest and perhaps the best study of people who have prediabetes showed that taking metformin cuts the risk of diabetes by 31 percent. While this was less than the reduction of 58 percent that the “lifestyle intervention” provided, in real life we usually aren’t able to get that much guidance from our medical team.

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Even if you have prediabetes you have a good chance of preventing type 2 diabetes. That’s the good news from five big research studies from around the world. But the studies also show that perhaps up to 70 percent of the people who have prediabetes will get type 2 diabetes, which no one can cure.

Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

If you know that you have prediabetes, you can think of yourself as being especially lucky. You can take your diagnosis as a wake-up call. Or, as the Certified Diabetes Educator Susan Semb calls it in the subtitle of her book Prediabetes, it is “an opportunity.”

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