Pre-diabetes in obese children remain undetected

Knowing if an obese child might develop diabetes in later years could prompt parents to make the necessary lifestyle changes for their child to lose weight. That’s the rationale behind a pre-diabetes screening recommended by the American Diabetes Association. The association and its Canadian equivalent recommend testing for fasting blood sugar for obese children ages 10 and older who are at risk for type 2 diabetes.

Unfortunately, this current test that both the US and Canada use are “inadequate”, preliminary data showed at an Endocrine Society Meeting in Ontario. Instead, a two-hour oral glucose tolerance test used along with the fasting plasma glucose could detect pre-diabetes in more children.

Typically, the two-hour test is not done on children because of the extra time and expense, and because it was previously thought that fasting glucose alone would catch most cases.

source: medpagetoday