medwireNews: Researchers show that a widely recommended online tool for patients to assess their risk of prediabetes will send almost all older patients to their doctors.
The “Do you have prediabetes?” test, based on seven simple questions, identified three of every five over 40-year-olds and four of every five over-60s as being at high risk of prediabetes and requiring a blood glucose test, report Saeid Shahraz (Tufts Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, USA) and colleagues in JAMA Internal Medicine.
This was based on data from 3815 people older than 40 years and 1841 over 60 years, without diabetes, from the 2013–2014 NHANES cohort. The researchers call it “premature” to send so many people to their doctors for blood tests, and also caution against the “medicalization” of prediabetes, causing it to absorb healthcare resources better spent on truly high-risk patients.
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