Wednesday 16 July 2014

Tee hee

From the BBC:

Labelling people as having pre-diabetes is "unhelpful and unnecessary", researchers claim. The definition, given to people on the "cusp" of type 2 diabetes, has no clinical worth, a joint UK-US team argues.

There is no proven benefit of prescribing drugs as many will not develop diabetes, the researchers write in the British Medical Journal.

But a charity said being identified as being at high risk was helpful. It offered the chance to reduce risk by eating a healthy diet and being physically active, said Diabetes UK.

People with pre-diabetes have no symptoms of ill health, but their blood sugar levels are at the high end of the normal range.

The term is not recognised by the World Health Organization but has been used in many scientific papers.

3 comments:

Bayard said...

Diabetes UK: another fakecharity trying to carve out a fiefdom amougst the disadvantaged

Anonymous said...

Funnily enough my daughters friend was commenting last night that her father has diabetes. I asked [as I remember he'd told me himself] whether he was 'borderline'. She said yes. I told her that was nothing much to worry about since half of England was borderline [pre-diabetic]. That was a wild assumption on my part but I know so many who are borderline I just extrapolated. Lo and behold on this morning's Today programme it turns out a third of adults are 'pre-diabetic' and it turns out as few as one in ten will go on to get type 2 diabetes within 10 years.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, yup.

PC, also yup. I think there are infinite shades of this, everybody is to some extent "diabetic" to the same extent that everybody is a bit "short sighted" as nobody can read a newspaper a mile away.