Prediabetes
Prediabetes describes blood sugar that sits above the usual range but below the threshold a physician uses to diagnose type 2 diabetes. It rarely causes symptoms, which is why it is usually found in a routine blood test rather than noticed.
What it is
Prediabetes is not a disease of its own — it is a position on a scale. Blood sugar has drifted above the usual range, but not far enough for a physician to call it type 2 diabetes. Where exactly those boundaries fall is set by clinical guidelines and applied by a physician to the whole picture, not to one number.
Two values do most of the work: fasting glucose, a snapshot of the moment the blood was drawn, and HbA1c, which reflects roughly the last three months. They can disagree — a single high fasting reading after a poor night's sleep says much less than an HbA1c that has been climbing across two tests.
The label matters less than the direction. What a physician looks at is whether the values are stable, drifting up, or coming back down.
Why it gets attention
Prediabetes is where the effort has the most leverage. Studies of structured lifestyle programmes show that a meaningful share of people move their values back into the usual range — the same effort applied later, after diabetes is established, buys less.
It also rarely announces itself. There is usually nothing to feel, which is why the values, and the trend across repeat tests, are the only thing to go on.
What influences the tracked measurements
The levers below are the ones most consistently associated with these values. This is general information; how often to re-test, and what to aim for, is decided with a physician.
- Muscle activity — muscle is where most glucose is taken up. Both a daily walking habit and resistance work contribute, and the effect on glucose handling is measurable within weeks.
- Carbohydrate quality and quantity — refined carbohydrate and sugary drinks raise the after-meal peaks that HbA1c averages out; fibre and protein blunt them.
- Body fat around the middle — waist circumference tracks this better than weight alone, and it is the fat depot most tied to how the body handles glucose.
- Sleep and stress — both raise glucose through hormonal routes, independently of what you eat.
- Re-testing on a sensible interval — a single value is a point; two or three across months are a direction.
This site does not give diets, doses or treatment, and it does not tell anyone whether they have prediabetes. Those are the physician's.
Which measurements are tracked
Prediabetes is followed almost entirely through blood tests, with body measurements for context — the body values are the ones a home scale and a tape measure can supply between lab visits.
How tracking it in one place helps
Cardiometabolic brings readings from your connected devices, your lab results and your own journal into one picture: how the measurements move across weeks and months, what changed, and which questions are worth asking. The analysis is AI-assisted and advisory, not diagnostic. You can grant view access to a physician or a relative — read-only and only with your explicit consent, which you can withdraw.
The platform is in closed beta — registration is by invitation. Request an invite or sign in to your account.
Frequently asked questions
Does prediabetes always become diabetes?
No. It raises the likelihood, but it is not a one-way street — many people hold their values steady or bring them back into the usual range. Which way it goes depends on the individual and is followed by repeat testing, not predicted from a single result.
Can a smartwatch detect it?
No. Consumer watches do not measure blood glucose. What they contribute is the context around it — activity, sleep, resting heart rate, weight trend from a connected scale — while the diagnosis-relevant values come from a blood test.
How often should the values be re-tested?
That is a clinical decision; it depends on the values themselves and on everything else in the picture. The general principle is that a trend across tests is more informative than any single result.
What is worth bringing to a physician?
The results of previous blood tests, so the trend is visible rather than described from memory, along with weight, waist and activity history from the same period.