ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Nearly half of all adults in the United States have either diabetes or prediabetes, yet more than 100 million, about one-third, remain undiagnosed.
To address this, researchers at the University of Michigan are investigating a unique, non-invasive screening method using a tool becoming more common in doctors’ offices.
The method uses point-of-care ultrasound, often called the stethoscope of the future, because it is performed by doctors “at the point of care” without requiring a separate test.
This research focuses on scanning the muscles of the shoulder or thigh, providing novel insight into a person’s diabetes risk.
Dr. Steven Soliman, a radiologist at the University of Michigan, explained, “Using muscle ultrasound, we not only identified that diabetes and prediabetes in skeletal muscle appear bright, what we refer to as hyperechoic, we also identified that in patients with insulin resistance, which can predate those conditions by decades, those muscles also appear bright.”
This discovery is significant because many patients with insulin resistance may not be detected using conventional biomarkers or blood tests like fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1c.
“Their blood work is normal, but their muscles we now can see are changing using ultrasound,” Soliman said.
While this type of prediabetes screening is still in the research phase and not yet available as a clinical tool, Soliman is hopeful that ultrasound will become as commonplace as checking blood pressure at a drugstore.
He envisions future studies incorporating artificial intelligence to automate the process, making it user-friendly and accessible with minimal training.
“We envision this in the future to be something that could be done at a local grocery store, pharmacy, school physicals, urgent care, ER visits, or primary care visits during vital signs,” Soliman said. “The output would basically predict somebody’s risk of metabolic disease.”
Currently, screening for diabetes and prediabetes involves simple blood tests, particularly the hemoglobin A1c test.
This test provides a good indication of a person’s average blood sugar over the past few months and is useful for monitoring diabetes progress.
Because the hemoglobin A1c reflects average blood sugar over time, it is generally more helpful than single blood sugar measurements for tracking progress.