Monitoring blood sugar is important when you’ve been told you have prediabetes, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Diabetes is known to cause increased risk for cardiovascular disease and many other health issues, so if you’ve been told you have prediabetes it’s important to stave off frank diabetes. Nas Mathioudakis, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins and one developer of an app that helps do just that, says monitoring blood sugar is foundational.

Mathioudakis :The A1C level for prediabetes is from 5.7 to 6.4. Six point five is diabetes. We know that the higher the A1C is within that range the more likely someone will be to have progressed towards diabetes, so that's 6 to 6.4 is higher risk. In general I would recommend at least annually for people that have pre diabetes guidelines say that you can check less frequently if it's stable and on the lower end, but if there's been a change in weight, lifestyle, less physical activity it's worth just checking in to see where you are.   :31

A1C levels reflect an average blood sugar over the previous two or three months. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.