New blood test could reveal whether you’ll get type 2 diabetes in 10 years as millions of Brits already have ‘pre-diabetes’

A blood test can tell people whether they are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next 10 years of their lives.

Around two million Britons are said to have ‘pre-diabetes’, meaning they have a 50/50 chance of developing the disease in the next five to 10 years.

Those at risk don’t have red flags because symptoms like excessive thirst don’t appear until someone actually has diabetes.

But that could change if scientists develop a blood test to look for early signs of type 2 diabetes.

The test looks for “DNA methylation” – chemical changes in the blood that show that the activity of diabetes-related genes is “called up” or “called up” when someone is in the early stages of their development.

Around two million Britons are believed to have ‘pre-diabetes’, meaning they have a 50/50 chance of developing the disease in the next five to 10 years

This leads to a more accurate prediction when combined with the method used by doctors, which calculates risk based on factors such as age, weight and family history of the disease.

Professor Riccardo Marioni, lead author of the study that developed the blood test, from the University of Edinburgh, said: “A blood test that tells people their risk of developing type 2 diabetes could be part of improved health tests in the future. “

To develop the blood test, the researchers looked at 14,613 people who agreed to have their health checked for 15 years in a study in Scotland.

With half of this group, they were able to see how the blood of those who developed type 2 diabetes differed from those who did not.

They then looked at how well their test would work on the other half – predicting cases occurring within the decade of a blood test.

The blood test, reported in the journal Nature Aging, could catch an additional 18 percent of people who will develop type 2 diabetes in the next decade.

This increased the proportion of people at risk identified using the standard method used by doctors from 30 per cent to 48 per cent when the blood test was used at the same time.