What Is Prediabetes?

Prediabetes means your blood sugar is higher than normal, but not high enough to be called diabetes.

It is not a mild version of diabetes and it is not a separate disease. It is a stage — the point on the way to Type 2 diabetes where the process has started but the damage has not.

What is happening is that your body has become less responsive to insulin, the hormone that moves glucose out of your blood and into your cells. Your pancreas compensates by making extra insulin, and for a long time that works. Prediabetes is the point where it is starting not to.

Two things make this stage different from diabetes, and both matter.

First, it is largely reversible. A substantial proportion of people with prediabetes return to normal blood sugar, and doing so meaningfully lowers their long-term risk. That option narrows once diabetes is established.

Second, it usually produces no symptoms at all, which is why most people who have it do not know.

So a prediabetes result is not a diagnosis of illness. It is early warning — the kind most people who develop Type 2 diabetes never get.