Prediabetes: Deal With It Now, Lower Your Risk of Getting the Full-Blown Disease

Silver lining: A chance to change
Hearing you have prediabetes isn't great. But there is a silver lining. If you make changes in your diet, increase exercise, and shed weight, you may be able to prevent or delay diabetes.

"There are also medications that we can give to folks with prediabetes that decrease the likelihood that they'll develop full-blown diabetes," says William Bornstein, MD, an endocrinologist at the Emory Clinic in Atlanta. One drug that can help prevent diabetes is metformin.

By the time most people are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas have lost 50% of their ability to function, says Nadine Uplinger, the director of the Gutman Diabetes Institute at the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia. That's why they may eventually need to take insulin injections to treat their blood sugar.

If prediabetes is picked up by routine tests in a doctor's office—as it often is—it's an opportunity for patients to possibly prevent or delay damage to those cells.

When he thinks back, Anil Verma suspects he probably had diabetes or prediabetes for several years before he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in May 2005. The 38-year-old Seattle-area resident had fatigue and noticed that he was healing slower. But even though both of his parents have type 2 diabetes, Verma thought he was too young to have developed the disease.

He's made big changes in his eating and exercise habits to control his diabetes, but he wishes he'd changed his lifestyle sooner.

"If I'd found out earlier, I could have stopped it or at least slowed it down. If you can catch it when you're prediabetic and lose the weight, you don't end up being diabetic. That's what I tell people now—catch it before it becomes a problem," he says.