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The Weight Connection
In a recent Harvard study involving 85,000 women, 61 percent of the diabetes cases that developed during the 16-year study period could be attributed to excess weight. But you don’t have to be obese, according to scientists at Kaiser Permanent Center for Health Research Northwest in Portland, Oregon. “In our study, there were moderately and even mildly overweight people who got diabetes before age 45,” says lead researcher Teresa Hillier, M.D. “The risk of early on set diabetes rose by 6 percent for every five to eight pounds of excess weight,” she says.

Interpreting Your Test
Getting a blood-glucose test is practically painless. A small amount of blood is taken from your arm first thing in the morning, before you’ve had anything to eat. A normal result is between 70 and 109 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter).

Diabetes is diagnosed when fasting glucose reaches 126 mg/dl or higher. Readings between 110 and 125 mg/dl indicate a condition called impaired fasting glucose (IFG). Until recently, doctors rarely treated IFG aggressively. But 30 million people are affected, and a third of them will go on to develop diabetes, according to a new study published in the journal of the American Medical Association. This makes knowing your blood-glucose level as important as knowing your cholesterol level or blood pressure. “Early detection of a problem is key, because the sooner you identify it, the sooner you can take action to prevent the long-term complications,” says Christopher Saudek, M.D., president of the American Diabetes Association.

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