Intensive lifestyle change can benefit people with prediabetes

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In a new study from German Center for Diabetes Research, researchers found intensive lifestyle intervention with plenty of exercises helps people with prediabetes improve their blood sugar levels and thus delay or even prevent type 2 diabetes.

More exercise and healthy eating behavior help many people with prediabetes to normalize their blood glucose levels and avoid developing type 2 diabetes.

However, not everyone benefits from a conventional lifestyle intervention (LI). Recent studies show that already in prediabetes, there are different subtypes with different risk profiles.

In the study, the team tested whether people with prediabetes and a high risk benefit from an intensification of the intervention.

The intervention lasted 12 months in each case and the follow-up period was a further two years.

A total of 1,105 individuals with prediabetes were examined and assigned to a high-risk or low-risk phenotype based on insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, and liver fat content.

The team found that more exercise helps people at high risk improve their blood glucose and cardiometabolic levels and reduce the liver fat content to within the normal range. Conventional lifestyle change is less effective.

After three years, glucose tolerance was more likely to normalize in participants with conventional lifestyle intervention than in those in the control group.

The study results show that an individualized lifestyle intervention based on is beneficial for diabetes prevention.

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The study is published in the journal Diabetes. One author of the study is Professor Andreas Fritsche.

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