Prediabetes Has No Symptoms

The defining feature of prediabetes is that you cannot feel it.

There is no headache, no thirst, no tiredness that marks it out. People with prediabetes feel entirely well, which is why most of those who have it do not know. In India's national study, 19.8% of the pregnancies-aside adult population was newly diagnosed during the study itself rather than already aware.

This has one enormous practical consequence: you cannot use how you feel as a guide.

If you wait until symptoms appear — real thirst, passing urine frequently, unexplained tiredness, blurred vision — you have almost certainly waited past prediabetes and into diabetes. Those symptoms belong to the later stage.

So prediabetes is found by testing people who feel fine. That is not over-medicalising; it is the only way to find something silent at the point where it is most reversible.

It also means you cannot monitor it by feel once you know. Your annual test is the instrument, not your sense of wellbeing.

The single most useful thing in this whole category is therefore unglamorous: get a fasting glucose or HbA1c at your next check-up, and again a year later, whether or not anything feels wrong.