Doctors worry about people whose blood sugar is elevated but not yet high enough to warrant a diagnosis of full blown diabetes. Such individuals are said to have prediabetes.
Staving Off Diabetes
When this condition is diagnosed, doctors have an effective medication to lower the likelihood that a patient will go on to develop diabetes. The medication, metformin, has long been used to treat diabetes itself.
However, a study of 17,000 adults with pre-diabetes found that relatively few people who could benefit from metformin were being prescribed the drug, only between 3 and 4 percent.
Why Is Metformin Prescribed Infrequently?
The authors hypothesize that doctors may not know of metformin’s benefits for pre-diabetes. That may be in part because the FDA has not approved the medicine for prevention. The American Diabetes Association started recommending metformin be used for this purpose back in 2008.
Annals of Internal Medicine, May 4, 2015
