Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, and today on the podcast, we are looking into the question of pre-diabetes. What is pre-diabetes?

What might someone do if they find out they have pre-diabetes? John Hopkins Professor Liz Selvin is the

director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. She's also a leading

diabetes epidemiologist. She joins Dr. Josh Starfstein to talk about how to determine if someone is at risk for developing type 2 diabetes and why that matters.

Let's listen.

Professor Liz Selban, thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health On Call to talk about the diagnosis of pre-diabetes. Now, maybe it would help if we started by

introducing yourself to our audience and explaining why in the world I would call you to talk about

diabetes. Hi, Josh. Thanks for having me. So I'm a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School

Public Health, and I've spent lots of time thinking about diabetes and prediabetes,

especially related to best approaches to screening and diagnosis.

I know that you have a tremendous national reputation,

and I really appreciate you're taking some time.

To talk, what is this idea of pre-diabetes?

What does that even mean?

Good question. So hyperglycemia or elevated glucose

levels exist along a continuum. And so pre-diabetes is a term that we use for individuals who are

below the threshold for a diagnosis of diabetes, but still have mildly elevated glucose and are thought to be at

high risk for the development of diabetes. Got it. So their blood sugar is high. There's signs that

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