Intensive lifestyle intervention could help lead a sugar-free life; Study

Intensive lifestyle intervention (ILIs) with plenty of exercises could help people with pre-diabetes to improve their blood glucose levels over a period of years and thus delay or even prevent type 2 diabetes, according to a new study by the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD).

However, not everyone benefits from a conventional lifestyle intervention (LI). Recent studies show that already in pre-diabetes, there are different subtypes with different risk profiles.

Therefore, researchers at (DZD) conducted a multicenter randomized controlled trial to see if people with pre-diabetes and a high risk of developing diabetes benefit from intensifying the intervention and how people with low risk are affected by a conventional LI compared to no lifestyle changes.

A total of 1,105 individuals with pre-diabetes were investigated for 12 years with two-year follow up at various study sites in Germany and assigned to a high-risk or low-risk phenotype based on insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, and liver fat content. 82 percent of participants completed the study.

The results showed that more exercise, which is more intensive LI, helps people at high risk improve their blood glucose and cardiometabolic levels and reduce the liver fat content to within the normal range. Conventional LI is less effective. Low-risk participants completed a conventional LI or took part in a control group that received only a one-time brief consultation.

“Our study results show that an individualized LI based on the risk phenotype is beneficial for diabetes prevention. For successful prevention, we need to identify high-risk patients in the future and focus on providing them with an intensified lifestyle intervention,” said study leader Professor Andreas Fritsche from the Institute of Diabetes Research and Metabolic Diseases (IDM) of Helmholtz Munich at the University of Tübingen.

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