New blood test could spot if you’ll get type 2 diabetes in a decade
New blood test could tell if you’ll get type 2 diabetes within 10 years as millions of Brits already have ‘prediabetes’
- Two million Britons have ‘prediabetes’ with a 50/50 chance of developing diabetes
- Scientists have developed a blood test to look for early signs of type 2 diabetes
A blood test can tell people if they are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next ten years of their life.
Around two million Britons are said to have ‘prediabetes’, meaning they have a 50/50 chance of developing the condition in the next five to 10 years.
Those at risk don’t have any red flags because symptoms like excessive thirst don’t show up until someone actually has diabetes.
But that could change if scientists develop a blood test to look for early signs of type 2 diabetes.
The test looks for “DNA methylation” – chemical changes in the blood that show that the activity of genes related to diabetes is “called up” or “called up” when someone is in the early stages of its development.
A blood test can tell people if they are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next ten years of their life
Around two million Britons are believed to have ‘prediabetes’, meaning they have a 50/50 chance of developing the condition in the next five to 10 years
That produces a more accurate prediction when combined with the method used by doctors – which calculates risk based on factors such as age, weight and family history of the disease.
Professor Riccardo Marioni, lead author of the study that developed the blood test, from the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘A blood test that gives people their risk of developing type 2 diabetes could be part of an improved health test in the future.’
To develop the blood test, researchers looked at 14,613 people who agreed to have their health checked over 15 years in a study in Scotland.
Using half of this group, they were able to see how the blood of those who developed type 2 diabetes differed from those who didn’t.
They then checked how well their test would work on the other half – for predicting cases occurring within the decade after a blood test was taken.
The blood test, reported in the journal Nature Aging, could pick up another 18 percent of people who would develop type 2 diabetes over the next decade.
That brought the percentage of people at risk detected with the standard method used by doctors, 30 percent, to 48 percent when the blood test was used at the same time.