Attending nutrition counseling sessions may reduce the risk for developing type 2 diabetes in youth with prediabetes, according to a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology.
Prediabetes — elevated blood glucose that doesn’t meet the threshold for diabetes — appears to be on the rise in youth in the United States. One study showed, in fact, that the rate of prediabetes among people ages 12 to 19 more than doubled over a 20-year period. But experts disagree about how alarming this trend is, since having prediabetes doesn’t necessarily mean someone will develop diabetes. Still, there is evidence that prediabetes alone can have harmful health effects. For example, younger adults with prediabetes are at higher risk for a heart attack, and prediabetes is linked to a higher risk for major depression. For all of these reasons, several U.S. medical societies have developed joint guidelines for diagnosing and managing prediabetes in youth.
To get cutting-edge diabetes news, strategies for blood glucose management, nutrition tips, healthy recipes, and more delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our free newsletters!
For the latest study, researchers looked at data from 108 youth with prediabetes who got a recommendation to receive nutrition counseling every three months following their prediabetes diagnosis. The researchers divided these participants into two groups — those who mostly followed through with this recommendation by attending two or more nutrition counseling visits each year, and those who didn’t follow through by attending one or zero nutrition counseling visits. The overall study group had 46 males with an average age of 12.4, and 62 females with an average age of 13.3 years old.
There were 44 participants who mostly followed their nutrition counseling recommendation. At the beginning of the study, these participants were similar to those who didn’t follow the recommendation when it came to several different measures — A1C level (a measure of long-term blood glucose control), use of the diabetes drug metformin, and racial or ethnic makeup of the group. But they tended to have a higher body-mass index (BMI, a measure of body weight that takes height into account) than participants who didn’t follow through with the recommended nutrition counseling.
Nutrition counseling linked to decreased diabetes risk
Overall, 18 participants (17.0%) developed type 2 diabetes during a 4-year follow-up period. Participants who followed through with nutrition counseling were less likely to develop type 2 diabetes — only four out of 44 (9.1%) developed it, compared with 14 out of 62 (22.6%) participants who didn’t follow through with nutrition counseling. What’s more, participants who followed through with nutrition counseling and went on to develop type 2 diabetes developed the condition after a median duration of 34.9 months, while those who didn’t follow through with nutrition counseling and developed type 2 diabetes did so after a median duration of 25.8 months.
Overall, the researchers found, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes — accounting for how long it took to develop the condition, as well as other factors — was 3.88 times as high among participants who didn’t follow through with recommended nutrition counseling. But larger studies that follow an interventional design — randomly assigning some participants to participate in nutrition counseling — are needed to gain a better understanding of how effective this type of counseling may be in preventing youth with prediabetes from developing type 2 diabetes.
Want to learn more about prediabetes? Read “What Is Prediabetes? Symptoms, Treatment, and More,” “Prediabetes Treatment” and “Diabetes Prevention: Eat to Beat Diabetes.”