Why Your Family Should Get Checked Too
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
Your diagnosis is useful information for everyone related to you, and it is worth passing on.
Having a parent or a sibling with diabetes is one of the standard reasons to be screened. So your brothers and sisters, your parents and your adult children all have a clear reason to get a fasting glucose or HbA1c done, whether or not they feel anything is wrong.
Two Indian specifics make this more pressing. Diabetes appears roughly a decade earlier in Indians than in white Europeans — a median age of diagnosis around the late forties rather than the early sixties. And it appears at lower body weight, which is why India treats a BMI of 23 as overweight rather than 25. A slim, apparently healthy relative in their thirties is not outside the risk group.
The full list of reasons to be tested is worth passing on. If a relative is told they have prediabetes, that is genuinely good news rather than bad. It is the stage where the direction can still change, and yearly retesting is recommended from then on.
There is a practical bonus. The changes that help you — more vegetables, smaller portions of the staple, a walk after dinner — are the same changes that reduce their risk. Doing it as a household is easier than doing it alone, and it means one person cooks one meal.