Who Should Set the Standards for Diagnosing Diabetes?
Nov. 16, 1999 (Cleveland) — Just two years after the American Diabetes Association (ADA) published new, simpler standards for diagnosing diabetes and classifying it in terms of its severity, researchers are saying that the simpler approach doesn’t go far enough to identify people at risk of death from diabetes complications. In three articles published in a recent issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, the researchers call for returning to earlier standards developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). One of the problems with the ADA standards, say the researchers, is that only fasting blood glucose (sugar) levels are tested — no oral test is given to confirm abnormally high levels. This means that people at risk for serious complications from diabetes mellitus, such as heart disease and stroke, could be “missed,” one of the researchers tells WebMD. According to the ADA criteria, a fasting glucose measurement — taken about eight hours after eating — of 126 mg/dL or m
