The Heart Health Danger Hiding In Plain Sight

Could you be one of the millions of American women who have prediabetes—but have no idea?

- Sunny Sea Gold

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 red blood-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.