This 11-Metre Walking Test May Help Doctors Spot Prediabetes Without Fasting or Needles |
Imagine Rajan, a 41-year-old Chennai resident. He goes to the gym three times a week, eats home-cooked meals, and has no family history of diabetes. At his last check-up, his doctor said he was fine. What nobody told Rajan — what nobody could tell him, with the tests available — is that his blood sugar has been quietly climbing for two years.
He is not sick. Not yet. But he is not entirely well either.
Rajan's story is not isolated. An estimated 136 million Indians are living with prediabetes right now — blood sugar quietly sitting in the dangerous grey zone above normal, but below the threshold that triggers a diagnosis. Most of them have no idea. The condition produces no pain, no obvious fatigue, no dramatic warning sign. It simply waits.
And then, one day, it becomes diabetes.
A tunnel, a walk, and a discovery
Inside King George's Medical University in Lucknow, Dr Seema Tewari from the physiology department asked a deceptively simple question: what if the body was already trying to tell us something — and we just weren't listening in the right way?
Her team built an 11-metre tunnel. Not a complicated structure — just a short, measured corridor fitted with Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA) scanners and motion sensors. Then they asked people to do the most ordinary thing imaginable: walk through it.
44 participants took part — 22 with diabetes, 22 without. As each person walked, the machines recorded everything. How fast they moved, how their weight shifted, how........