The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) released a draft recommendation statement on diabetes screening.
The new recommendations suggest screening for abnormal glucose in all adults over the age of 45, the Endocrine Society reported.
"The Endocrine Society applauds and fully supports the USPSTF's new diabetes screening recommendations to include measuring blood glucose for adults at increased risk for diabetes," said Robert A. Vigersky, MD, past-president of the Endocrine Society and director of the Diabetes Institute at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. "It's critical to identify people with undiagnosed diabetes and risk factors for diabetes to allow for early interventions to prevent or delay the disease and its complications."
Other risk factors for diabetes include "obesity, physical inactivity, and smoking and non-modifiable risk factors such as increasing age, race/ethnicity, a genetic predisposition to insulin resistance, a first-degree relative with diabetes and, in women, a history of gestational diabetes or polycystic ovarian syndrome," the Society reported.
Before this new statement it was recommended that only asymptomatic adults with high systolic blood pressure undergo diabetes screening. These new recommendations were prompted by recent scientific research that screening adults who have an increased risk of diabetes as well as treating those who have impaired fasting glucose (IFG) and impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) with lifestyle interventions had a moderate effect on diabetes progression.
Some of these lifestyle modifications could "improved nutrition, healthy eating behaviors and increased physical activity," the Society reported.
These types of lifestyle modifications were found to result in lower incidents of diabetes, cardiovascular mortality and even all-cause mortality.
Today more than 29 million people in the U.S. suffer from diabetes, and an additional 8.1 million are believed to not know they have the condition, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of adults in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 79 with newly-diagnosed with diabetes more than tripled between 1980 and 2011.
