Reducing glycemic load found to lower diabetes risk in pre-diabetic patients

Researchers from Sun Yat-Sen University in China examined the longitudinal associations between changes in glycemic load (GL) and the incidence of diabetes among pre-diabetic patients. Their results were published in the journal Nutrition Research.

• According to the researchers, only a few prospective studies that evaluated the association between GL and diabetes have accounted for changes in GL.
• They believe that the diet of patients could be modified in response to an awareness of pre-diabetes.
• They hypothesized that subjects with low and high baseline GL would show different correlations with diabetes.
• For this study, they recruited a total of 493 pre-diabetic patients (142 men and 351 women) between 40 and 79 years of age.
• They obtained dietary records and conducted oral glucose tolerance tests on the participants every year.
• They divided the participants into low- and high-GL groups based on baseline GL.
• During a median four years of follow-up, they identified 108 incident cases of diabetes.
• Among participants with a high baseline GL, the incidence of diabetes increased with decreasing GL reduction, and the multivariate-adjusted HR (95 percent CI) was 2.34 (1.27–4.29) when comparing the lowest to the highest tertiles.
• However, among those with a low baseline GL, the researchers observed no significant association.
• Regardless of baseline GL status, the incidence of diabetes was higher in individuals with a high follow-up GL than in those with a low follow-up GL, and the multivariate-adjusted HR (95 percent CI) was 1.64 (1.09–2.45).

Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that GL reduction is associated with a lower diabetes risk in pre-diabetic patients with a high dietary GL, while in patients with pre-diabetes and a low dietary GL, further reductions in GL do not have any additional effects.

Journal Reference:

He FY, Chen CG, Lin DZ, Lin XH, Qi YQ, Yan L. A GREATER GLYCEMIC LOAD REDUCTION WAS ASSOCIATED WITH A LOWER DIABETES RISK IN PRE-DIABETIC PATIENTS WHO CONSUME A HIGH GLYCEMIC LOAD DIET. Nutrition Research. May 2018;53:77–84. DOI: 10.1016/j.nutres.2018.03.011