According to the official reports, U. S. researchers say they are on the trail of a faster, easier test to detect pre-diabetes, long before symptoms occur and in time to reverse the disease.

It was found by Biochemists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, led by Gerald Hart that high amounts of a difficult-to-detect sugar, O-GlcNAc, occur in reaction to diet and stress in those with diabetes.

It has been reported that to discover how early this elevation may begin and how useful it could be to early diagnosis, Kyoungsook Park, a graduate student in Hart's lab, measured the easier-to-detect enzyme O-GlcNAcase -- which helps break O-GlcNAc down.

Published in the journal Diabetes, the study found that levels of this enzyme were two to three times higher in people with diabetes and pre-diabetes than in controls with no disease

Park said in a statement, "When I checked the enzyme levels and saw how dramatically different they were between the pre-diabetic cells and the controls, I thought I did something wrong. I repeated the test five times until I could believe it myself."

The report further noted that Park had looked at enzyme levels in blood samples already characterized using traditional tests requiring patient fasting, 36 as normal, 13 as pre-diabetes and 53 as type 2 diabetes. (With Inputs from Agencies)