A Kaiser Permanente study published online in Diabetes Care, the American Diabetes Association journal, has found that patients who are losing weight after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have better control of their blood pressure and blood sugar.

The benefits are maintained even if they regain the lost weight. The study looked at electronic medical records, spanning 1997 to 2002, for 2,574 patients aged 21 through 75 who had been recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The team of researchers, headed by Gregory A. Nichols, an investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., followed up on the patients for four years.

They found that around 12 percent of patients lost more than 25 pounds, and almost all of those pounds were regained by 36 months. However, the blood pressure and blood sugar levels in their fourth year were better than the other groups.

The researchers caution that they did not look at the patients beyond four years after diagnosis, which means that the benefits could fade over time due to the regained weight.

The latest recommendations by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) state that people with pre-diabetes should be treated properly and this should be done before their condition worsens and transforms into diabetes.

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.

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.