San Antonio (Nov. 7, 2003) – The oral glucose tolerance test, which diagnoses patients at high risk for diabetes but is costly and inconvenient, may soon be put to rest.
A cluster of factors known as metabolic syndrome is able to predict Type 2 diabetes independently of other risk factors such as fasting insulin, according to a new report by clinical epidemiologists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The study, published in the November issue of Diabetes Care, is available at care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/26/11/3153.
The group compared two different definitions of metabolic syndrome to see which best predicted diabetes among 1,734 subjects in the San Antonio Heart Study. The lead author is Carlos Lorenzo, M.D., of the Health Science Center’s department of medicine (division of clinical epidemiology).