People with pre-diabetes should be treated properly and this should be done before their condition worsens and transforms into diabetes, according to new recommendations released on Tuesday by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologist (AACE).

Diabetes is the fifth leading cause of death in the US according to the American Diabetes Association. There are some 21 million Americans living with this disease, with 6.2 million not even knowing that they have it. To make things even worse, an additional 57 million Americans have pre-diabetes, placing them at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Pre-diabetes occurs when a person’s blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not sufficiently high to be categorized as diabetes.

“Diabetes has become the major problem in the United States,” Dr. Harold Lebovitz, a professor of medicine at the division of endocrinology and metabolism/diabetes at the State University of New York Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn said at a teleconference on Wednesday. He also added that diabetes further leads to kidney failure and blindness and causes about 60 percent of cardiovascular disease.

That’s why he urged for immediate measures to treat pre-diabetes. People should not wait until they develop diabetes to get treatment. They should make changes in their lifestyles first by adopting a low-fat diet and a daily program of physical exercise. They should also control their weight and try to lose about 5 to 10 percent of it in order to see improvements. They should give up alcohol and sodium to lower blood pressure and take aspirin if their health allows it.

If these measures do not help, then people should consider medication backed by a healthy lifestyle. But since there are no drugs authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration for controlling pre-diabetes, the AACE suggests another way to get them: decrease the number at which blood sugar levels indicate diabetes. This way, people classified as having pre-diabetes would benefit from proper medications in order to deal with their disease.

In order to prevent diabetes, Daniel Einhorn, vice president of the AACE suggested that people with elevated triglycerides, low HDL, high fasting glucose, big waist circumference, and high blood pressure should be considered for glucose tests, because they are at high risk of diabetes. In the same category enters women with prior gestational diabetes and people with a family history of type 2 diabetes and obese patients.