The Scary Heart Health Danger Hiding in Plain Sight - Article Health

Last spring, I finally made it into my nurse practitioner’s office for a physical, my first one in about five years. (I’d been pregnant twice, moved across the country, bought and sold my first house—I’d been busy!) What I learned from my blood test results shocked and scared me: I was prediabetic.

Prediabetes isn’t a disease the way pneumonia or cancer is; it’s more like a big, flashing red warning that you’re headed in the wrong direction. "It’s a sign you may develop type 2 diabetes in the future," says John Buse, MD, director of the UNC Diabetes Care Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As a longtime health journalist, I know having full-blown type 2 diabetes is no joke: That condition can double a person’s risk of dying of heart disease, the number one killer of American women. It’s also linked to many cancers and, if left untreated, to nerve and kidney damage and vision problems. But prediabetes can be harmful, too. "Even at the prediabetic stage, there’s an increased risk for heart disease and stroke," says Don Kain, RD, a certified diabetes educator at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. (In fact, prediabetes alone increases your risk of heart disease by 10 percent.)

Prediabetes is easy to diagnose via a simple blood test called the A1C, which measures how much of your hemoglobin—a redblood-cell protein—has sugar attached to it. (Below 5.7 percent is normal, and anything between that and 6.4 is considered prediabetic; 6.5 and above earns you a diabetes diagnosis.) Yet even though nearly a third—29 percent— of American women are prediabetic, almost 90 percent of them don’t know it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One of the biggest concerns with having too much sugar circulating in your blood is that it may trigger chronic inflammation that in turn is associated with everything from heart attack and cancer to Alzheimer’s. “The purpose of the sugar in your blood is to be moved into your body cells as fuel—it’s really not supposed to be just hanging around in there,” says Lindsay Malone, RD, a dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic. It also triggers your body to pump out extra insulin in an effort to process the blood sugar. Excess insulin causes even more inflammation, and the whole process taxes the pancreas over time.

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