Understanding the risk factors that could lead to prediabetes and diabetes type 2… • Weight: Being overweight (have a body mass index—a BMI—of higher than 25), increases your risk for developing prediabetes. This is especially true if you carry a lot of extra weight in your abdomen. The extra fat cells can cause your body to become more insulin resistant.
• Being inactive: This often goes hand-in-hand with being overweight. If you aren’t physically active, you’re more likely to develop prediabetes.
• Having a close family member with type 2 diabetes: Prediabetes has a hereditary factor. If someone in your close family has (or had) it, you are more likely to develop it.
• Race/ethnicity: Certain ethnic groups are more likely to develop prediabetes, including African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.
• Age: The older you are, the more at risk you are for developing prediabetes. At age 45, your risk starts to rise, and after age 65, your risk increases exponentially.
• Gestational diabetes: If you developed diabetes while you were pregnant, that increases your risk for developing prediabetes later on.
• Other health problems: High blood pressure (hypertension) and high cholesterol (the “bad” LDL cholesterol) increase your risk of getting type 2 diabetes. • Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) also raises the risk of prediabetes because it’s related to insulin resistance. •
Hypothyroidism (low thyroid function; not enough circulating thyroid hormone), and you have prediabetes, then your risk of developing T2D more than doubles in comparison to individuals with normal thyroid function.
