How does Prediabetes begin?
Insulin is a hormone made by the pancreas that acts like a key to let blood sugar into cells for use as energy. If you have prediabetes, the cells in your body don’t respond normally to insulin. The pancreas makes more insulin to try to get cells to respond. Eventually pancreas can’t keep up, and the blood sugar rises, setting the stage for prediabetes—and type 2 diabetes down the road.
Signs & Symptoms
One can have prediabetes for years but have no clear symptoms, so it often goes undetected until serious health problems such as Type 2 diabetes show up.
It’s important to get the blood sugar tested if any of the risk factors for prediabetes, exists like:
- Being overweight
- Being 40 years or older
- Having a parent, brother, or sister with type 2 diabetes
- Being physically inactive (Exercise / walking less than 3 times a week)
- Ever having gestational diabetes (diabetes during pregnancy) or giving birth to a baby who weighed more than 9 pounds
- Having polycystic ovary syndrome
People who have metabolic syndrome—a combination of high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, and large waist size—are more likely to have prediabetes.
Although you can’t change risk factors such as family history, age, or ethnicity, you can change lifestyle risk factors around eating, physical activity, and weight.
These lifestyle changes can lower your chances of developing insulin resistance or prediabetes.
Prediabetes is associated with the simultaneous presence of insulin resistance and β-cell dysfunction, abnormalities that start before glucose changes are detectable
The development of diabetes from normal glucose tolerance (NGT) is a continuous process. Studies in high-risk individuals suggest that insulin resistance is a very early phenomenon, occurring years before any evidence of glucose intolerance or β-cell failure – predicting the development of Type 2 diabetes.
Accumulation of Visceral Fat(which is stored in a person’s abdominal cavity) correlates with insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and other components of the metabolic syndrome.
The first stage of diabetes development is a long compensatory period when insulin resistance is present and to overcome this there is increased rates of insulin secretion and an increased β-cell mass.
The second stage is the period when β-cells are no longer fully compensating for increased insulin resistance;inspite of the increased insulin secretion. Thus fasting and/or postload glucose values are not completely maintained. Much of the first and second stages occur before the prediabetic phase is achieved.
During this unstable period which is the third stage of diabetes development, the β-cells become unable to compensate for a given insulin resistance and consequently glucose levels start to increase rapidly. This period probably extends from prediabetes to Type 2 Diabetes.
