Due to lack of awareness, people having blood sugar levels that are elevated are not likely to make helpful lifestyle changes as well like eating food that is less sugary or getting more exercises, which could prevent them from having diabetes ultimately. Pre- diabetic people tend to lose their weight modestly and increasing their physical activity could reduce their likelihood of them developing diabetes as found out by the study. Most importantly, this study shows that people who are pre-diabetes and are well aware of the diagnosis had a high likelihood of engaging in some effective healthy lifestyle changes that are also highly recommended.

More people with diabetes today

Global statistics show that one in nine people have diabetes with the disease being the seventh leading death causes in the world by year 2030 according to a report by World Health Organization. A majority of these people essentially have adult onset pr Type 2 diabetes that happens when their body is not able to make or properly use insulin hormone for conversion of the blood sugar to energy. The average levels of sugar in the blood over the several months could be estimated through measuring of the changes in red blood cell hemoglobin molecule. Hemoglobin A1C is a test that measures the hemoglobin percentage, i.e. protein in red blood cells, which carries oxygen, it is sugar coated with 6.5 percent reading or above signaling diabetes.

Measurement of blood sugar levels

However, levels of A1C ranging from 5.7 percent to 6.4 percent are regarded as elevated even though this is not yet diabetic as such. About a third of the adults in U.S have high levels of blood sugar levels with about 11% of them progressing to full blown diabetes as noted by the researchers. To gauge the awareness of the increased risk faced by people having this condition, the researchers weeded the people out whom they said have the disease already. For the rest of them, their A1C results were reviewed.

For the 2,694 people whose test results showed elevated A1C, just 288 of them knew of their status. Those people who were knowledgeable of their condition had a likelihood of 30 percent to exercise with each of them getting 150 minutes of exercising moderately each week. In addition, this people also had an 80 percent more likelihood of trying weight loss and have in the past one year lost about 7% of their body weight. Diabetes screening was found not to help in identification of the people nearing full blown disease. There is a possibility that some of the patients involved in the study were informed about their status but never recalled neither did they understand the actual way in which the researchers asked them about their condition.