Up to 6 different subtypes of prediabetes
Hi everyone, I've recently been doing research on prediabetes, and something that I've found has kind of blown my mind. There's a german center of diabetes research that published results a few years ago that identifies 6 subtypes or clusters of prediabetes.
There's three types that don't have a risk of progressing to type 2, and three that do. Both have subtypes with patients who were both at a healthy weight and overweight, but there were other factors that determined if they would progress to type 2.
There's also further division in the treatment if you have impaired fasting glucose(IFG) vs impaired glucose tolerance(IGT). IFG responds to nutrition and caloric changes, while IGT primarily responds to exercise.
I have a family friend who was diagnosed prediabetic in her late 60's, and after finding out she had IGT she switched to mainly strength training 4x a week. That gave her more results than the nutrition approach did. I didn't have a title for it until finding out about IGT in research, but this seems pretty huge.
A lot of online info about prediabetes neglects these categories, why? It seems really important to know what your specific glucose response is when doing treatment to change it, but I haven't heard health professionals bring this up in any seminars or articles that I've read in the past.
I'm worried about being at risk of prediabetes, but if I knew what subtype I was, it would be way easier to construct treatment around it. Wanted to make this article to both get my thoughts out and to maybe inspire other people to investigate what subtype they are.