Lifetime Prevalence and Prognosis of Prediabetes Without Progression to Diabetes

Impaired fasting glucose, also termed prediabetes, is increasingly prevalent and is associated with adverse cardiovascular risk (1). The cardiovascular risks attributed to prediabetes may be driven primarily by the conversion from prediabetes to overt diabetes (2). Given limited data on outcomes among nonconverters in the community, the extent to which some individuals with prediabetes never go on to develop diabetes and yet still experience adverse cardiovascular risk remains unclear. We therefore investigated the frequency of cardiovascular versus noncardiovascular deaths in people who developed early- and late-onset prediabetes without ever progressing to diabetes. We used data from the Framingham Heart Study collected on the Offspring Cohort participants aged 18–77 years at the time of initial fasting plasma glucose (FPG) assessment (1983–1987) who had serial FPG testing over subsequent examinations with continuous surveillance for outcomes including cause-specific mortality (3). As applied in prior epidemiological investigations (4), we used a case-control design focusing on the cause-specific outcome of cardiovascular death to minimize the competing risk issues that would be encountered in time-to-event analyses. To focus on outcomes associated with a given chronic glycemic state maintained over the entire lifetime, we restricted our analyses to only those participants for whom data were available over the life course and until death. We included participants who attended …