Anthony Campbell's blog

There was a lot of excitement in the media this week about a report in the BMJ which, we were told, said that there had been a huge increase in the incidence of prediabetes (blood sugar raised although not to the level of actual diabetes) in the British population since 2003. Now a third of us is in this state and before long the NHS will be swamped by a tsuname of patients with diabetes. So when my copy of the journal arrived I looked to find this item given a prominent place, probably with an editorial comment.

It turns out that the paper is published in the online journal BMJ Online. Its findings are summarised in the current print journal, which also cites a quite extensive comment by John Yudkin, emeritus professor medicine at University College, London. He questions the validity of the "prediabetes" diagnosis, calling it an example of "overdiagnosis". Most people with this "condition" will never develop diabetes The term is rejected both by NICE and the WHO. It "brings with it the the burden of disease labelling and risks of largely unproven interventions."

The media, of course, didn't mention any of this.