WVDHHR > Division of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease > Focus Areas > Diabetes

Preventing Type 2 Diabetes for Providers

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Use this guide to help your patients delay or prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes

Prediabetes is a health condition characterized by blood glucose levels that are higher than normal, but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. Prediabetes increases the risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Prediabetes is treatable, but only about 10 percent of people who have it are aware that they do. Left untreated up to one-third of people with prediabetes will progress to diabetes within five years.

During that window of time your patients can benefit from a proven lifestyle change intervention that is part of the National Diabetes Prevention Program (National DPP) led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As part of the National DPP, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the CDC are collaborating to create tools and resources that care teams can use to identify patients with prediabetes, and refer eligible patients to in-person or online diabetes prevention programs.

Physicians and care teams from a diverse group of practices helped the AMA and the CDC create the tools in this guide, and have used them in their own practices to:

Screen and identify patients for prediabetes

Refer patients to diabetes prevention programs

Create feedback loops, linking the patient’s progress in the diabetes prevention program back to the practice

Part of a national movement

To achieve CDC recognition as part of the National DPP, programs must provide evidence they are following a CDC-approved curriculum and achieving meaningful results with patients. These programs are based on research showing that a year-long, structured lifestyle change intervention reduced the incidence of diabetes by 58 percent among adults with prediabetes and by 71 percent in those aged 60 years or older.

These programs are successful in part because they require only moderate weight loss to achieve preventive health benefits. Weight loss of 5 to 7 percent of body weight—10 to 14 pounds for a person weighing 200 pounds—led to the results mentioned above.

The AMA and the CDC are promoting these diabetes prevention programs because they are one of the most effective ways to help physicians prevent or delay type 2 diabetes in high-risk patients.

Use this implementation guide and its tools to help identify and refer patients with prediabetes to a diabetes prevention program that is part of the CDC’s National DPP.