What Are Some Risk Factors of Diabetes?
Doctors can predict how fast patients with prediabetes may progress to diabetes. In this video, Judith Fradkin, MD, director at the National Institutes of Health, explains what risk factors play a role.
Transcript
Diabetes is really a disease that evolves over decades. And it really has to be thought of in that way.
There's a period where people are at risk. And people progress to diabetes at very different rates.
And we can identify some of the risk factors that relate to why somebody might develop diabetes faster
than somebody else. So for example, if you take somebody with prediabetes-- which is the state where your blood sugar is a little bit
higher than normal, but not high enough to be called diabetes-- you can take somebody who has the exact same level of blood
glucose in that prediabetes phase, and you can predict how fast they're likely to progress to diabetes.
So for example, a woman who had diabetes when she was pregnant-- she can have all the same characteristics as somebody
who didn't have diabetes when they were pregnant-- she will progress to diabetes twice as fast as somebody who didn't
have gestational diabetes. So there are a lot of factors now that enable us to characterize people
much more specifically than just saying, your blood glucose is in the normal range, the prediabetes range, or the diabetes range.
diabetes prevention
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