PREDIABETES: Diet and exercise can keep diabetes at bay

Because type 2 diabetes, of which prevalence could reach 750 million people worldwideis associated with an increased risk of death and disability and imposes a considerable economic burden on societies worldwide. Simple lifestyle changes could delay this steady rise in prevalence, in particular by slowing the development of diabetes in people who already have glucose intolerance – or prediabetes.

This research concludes that these prediabetic people can thus reduce, without medication and through lifestyle measures, their long-term risk of death and diabetes comorbidities and freeze the progression of diabetes.

In most cases, diet and exercise are “enough”

The study followed, for more than 30 years, the health results of 540 prediabetic participants, divided into 3 6-year lifestyle intervention groups, including 2 groups involving following a healthy diet, doing more exercise, or both. The team assessed each group’s long-term risk of death, cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke or heart failure) and other complications of diabetes. The analysis finds that:

• the combination of healthy eating + exercise helps block the transition from prediabetes to diabetes;

• prediabetic participants who remained diabetic-free for at least 4 years after their initial diagnosis of prediabetes had a significantly reduced risk of death and cardiovascular events vs those who developed diabetes earlier, which is not surprising;
• this protective effect is not observed in participants who remained diabetic-free for a period less than this “four-year threshold”.

In conclusionthe analysis suggests that these 2 lifestyle measures can delay the transition from prediabetes to diabetes and that the more a prediabetic patient succeeds in delaying the development of diabetes, the better are its long-term health outcomes. Thus, 4 years of maintaining the prediabetic stage can provide lifelong benefits.

Doctors must therefore encourage their prediabetic patients to opt, early on, for a healthy lifestyle, by explaining to them the lifelong benefits linked to postponing the development of diabetes as late as possible…and its comorbidities.