Achieving remission

Type 2 diabetes remission isn’t a cure-all for diabetes. It can come back if your weight and lifestyle changes aren’t maintained.

What it means is that your blood glucose levels are within a healthy range and by losing weight, you’ve probably lowered your cholesterol and blood pressure too.

All of these factors reduce your risk of developing diabetes complications with your eyes, feet, kidneys or heart.

However, as the long-term benefits of remission are still not fully understood yet, it’s still important that you attend all of your diabetes-related screening appointments. This is to make sure that you’re maintaining your HbA1c levels within the healthy range, and that any potential problems can be picked up quickly.

What if weight loss doesn’t lead to remission?

There’s still a lot that is unknown about type 2 diabetes remission. Not everyone that loses weight will achieve remission.

The research so far indicates that remission is most likely if you lose weight as soon as possible after your diagnosis, but there has been cases of people putting their diabetes into remission many years after diagnosis.

If your diabetes doesn’t go into remission after weight loss, you will still gain many health benefits from losing weight. These include lowered blood pressure and cholesterol levels, improvements in your blood glucose level and you may need fewer medications.