Answer ten questions, then tally your diabetes risk score; if you’re at risk, take steps now to prevent the disease.

Measuring your waist size can help you size up your diabetes risk.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine brings doctors a step closer to predicting risk of type 2 diabetes using a simple question-and-answer system instead of blood tests. By answering about 10 questions and tallying up their score, people who take the test can get a relatively accurate assessment of their risk, and find out how urgent it is to undertake preventive measures.

THE DETAILS: Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looked at 14 years of data from a sample of 12,729 adults between the ages of 45 and 64 who participated in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. When all participants were first interviewed, none had been diagnosed with diabetes. For the ARIC study, each person was asked to provide basic information on whether his or her parents had diabetes, and his or her race, smoking history, alcohol consumption, height and weight, waist circumference, blood pressure, and pulse rate. The CDC researchers created a scoring system that assigned a point value to each of these risk factors. They found that, using only a simple set of questions, they were able to accurately identify patients who were at an increased risk for developing diabetes before they began showing symptoms.

WHAT IT MEANS: The incidence of type 2 diabetes has more than doubled in this country in the last 30 years, and the disease contributes to about 250,000 deaths in the U.S. per year. Many people with this form of diabetes, even those already developing complications, are not even aware they have it. A test such as the one validated in this study would allow doctors to pinpoint patients who are most at risk and get them started on a prevention program. “We’d like to move the calendar back a bit to a stage where there are no symptoms and no damage has been done yet, so we can more appropriately focus our efforts on preventing rather than simply treating the disease,” says Henry Kahn, MD, study coauthor.