A new research shows that blood glucose levels of people admitted to hospitals are helpful in identifying the risk of developing type-2 diabetes over the next three years.

The research by David McAllister and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, the U.K., examined blood glucose levels of 86,634 patients aged 40 and above. All the patients were hospitalized in Scotland for acute illness between 2004 and 2008.

The team used the Scottish Care Information-Diabetes Collaboration national surgery to find out the participants who developed type-2 diabetes up to December 2011. Researchers found that the risk of developing the disease for 3 years was 2.3 percent. They explained that the increased risk of type-2 depended on the blood glucose levels of the patients at the time of hospitalization.

According to the findings, for people with blood glucose levels less than 5 mmol/l, the 3-year risk of type-2 diabetes was only 1 percent, but the risk increased by 15 percent in people with glucose of 15 mmol/l or more.

Following this, the researchers created a risk calculator taking their analyses as the bases. They looked into the patients' age, sex and blood glucose levels to determine the risk of developing diabetes over 3 years after hospitalization. "These findings can be used to inform individual patients of their long-term risk of type-2 diabetes and to offer lifestyle advice as appropriate," researchers wrote in the study.

A recent study showed that blood glucose levels can be kept under control by having whey protein prior to a meal. The findings showed that those who consumed whey before meals reported 28 percent glucose reduction after 180 minutes of consumption of food. With whey pre-load, insulin and GLP-1 responses also were significantly higher (105 and 141 percent, respectively), producing a 96 percent increase in early insulin response.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Medicine.