New Diabetes Risk Assessment Guidelines
| In the most recent American Diabetes Association position statement, hemoglobin A1C has now become a diagnostic criteria for the presence of diabetes and for identifying people at high risk for developing diabetes.
The new diagnostic criteria for diabetes is an A1C test result of 6.5 percent or higher.(1) Persons with an A1C of 5.7 percent to 6.4 percent fall into the "Increased risk for diabetes" category or prediabetes. That means that an A1C of 5.6 or lower is recommended for good health. In fact, persons with an A1C level of 5.0 percent or lower have even a lower risk of both diabetes and risk of coronary heart disease. A big advantage of using A1C as diagnostic screening criteria is that blood tests do not need to be fasting.
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at A1C blood test results in a large population of 11,000 people. After several years of follow-up researchers evaluated A1C as a predictor of who would develop diabetes, coronary heart disease, or die from any cause. They found A1C to be as good as fasting glucose levels in predicting risk of developing diabetes, and A1C was a better predictor than were glucose levels for predicting heart disease and risk of death from any cause.(2)
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The researchers summarized their study by saying, "These data add to the evidence supporting the use of glycated hemoglobin as a diagnostic test for diabetes."
References:
1. ADA Position Statement on Diagnosis and classification of diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2010;33:Suppl S64-S71.
2. E. Selvin, et al. Glycated hemoglobin, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk in nondiabetic adults. New England Journal of Medicine. 2010 Mar 4;362:800-811.
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