Living With Borderline Diabetes
By Alice Saracho
It can send a chill up anyone's spine being informed by your physician that you have borderline diabetes. This is a disease that can literally alter your life. But, each year, hundreds of thousands of patients go through that scenario. The number of people diagnosed with continually rises. At present, there are over 18 million known case of in the U.S. that have diabetes. It's estimated that there's approximately 6 million more people that have and don't know it. And it remains a serious health problem costing patients billions of dollars in health care every year.

What exactly is borderline diabetes? Sometimes called pre-diabetes, it's a condition where a person has glucose levels between normal levels and levels that would identify them as diabetic. The reason that many people don't know they have the condition is that it's relatively free of symptoms. In a person without diabetes, the body will produce insulin to help the cells break down food into energy. In diabetics and pre-diabetics, however, either the body is unable to create insulin or it is unable to utilize the insulin. This is one reason why people with borderline tend to be tired much of the time. They are eating, but their body is unable to break down the food into usable energy.


A lot of physicians have discontinued using the terminology borderline to describe this condition. The way they see it, a person who exhibits the symptoms of pre-diabetes is, in fact diabetic. and they see no real medical reason to confuse the situation. many also feel that telling someone that they have borderline

inhibits the person from taking diagnosis seriously - because "borderline" sound as if you don't really have a disease. Others doctors feel that the condition of these patients is more precisely described as insulin resistant or impaired glucose tolerance. Other doctors, however, still use the term and find it helpful to maintain the distinction between pre-diabetes and diabetes.

For those in the medical field that continue to use the term, borderline is diagnosed when a person's glucose level, as determined by glucose tests, fall between 100 to 125 milligrams per deciliter.

Unfortunately, in most cases, a person who has borderline will see the disease progress to diabetes. In some cases, however, with a change of eating habits and other healthy lifestyle changes, the disease will be reversed.

Many health experts believe that pre-diabetes is a preventable disease. Studies have shown a distinct correlation between the increase in the amount of fast foods that we eat and the new incidences of type II diabetes. Likewise, there is a correlation between our increasingly sedentary lifestyles with increases in the number of people diagnosed with diabetics. Making the defeat of even more urgent is that a person with pre-diabetes or is at greater risk for a host of other diseases including heart disease, stroke, liver disease, and more.

Fortunately, scientists and researchers have started to discover and catalog the many risk factors that predispose one towards getting diabetes. They are hopeful that, in the near future, will be looked upon as disease of the past.
Alice Saracho is webmaster and writer of www.diabetescausestreatments.com. Visit her site and find articles on what is borderline diabetes as well as other information and products regarding diabetes.