Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Diabetes. Oct 15, 2016; 7(18): 423-432
Published online Oct 15, 2016. doi: 10.4239/wjd.v7.i18.423
Update on pre-diabetes: Focus on diagnostic criteria and cardiovascular risk
Antonino Di Pino, Francesca Urbano, Salvatore Piro, Francesco Purrello, Agata Maria Rabuazzo
Antonino Di Pino, Francesca Urbano, Salvatore Piro, Francesco Purrello, Agata Maria Rabuazzo, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Catania, 95122 Catania, Italy
Author contributions: Di Pino A wrote the manuscript; Urbano F reviewed and edited the manuscript; Piro S, Purrello F and Rabuazzo AM reviewed and edited the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interest for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Francesco Purrello, MD, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Catania, Via Palermo, 95122 Catania, Italy. fpurrell@unict.it
Telephone: +39-09-57598401 Fax: +39-09-57598421
Received: April 8, 2016
Peer-review started: April 8, 2016
First decision: June 12, 2016
Revised: July 22, 2016
Accepted: August 11, 2016
Article in press: August 15, 2016
Published online: October 15, 2016
Processing time: 186 Days and 15.6 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Pre-diabetes is a high-risk state for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There are three diagnostic criteria for pre-diabetes: Impaired fasting glucose (IFG), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) between 39-46 mmol/mol. The concordance between a pre-diabetes diagnosis made by IFG, IGT or HbA1c is scarce and there are conflicting data as to which of these methods best predicts cardiovascular disease. This review focuses on the evidence regarding the ability of HbA1c for pre-diabetes diagnosis and as a marker for cardiovascular risk. Finally, the evidence regarding non-traditional glycaemic biomarkers as alternatives to the traditional ones is reviewed.