Atherosclerotic risk factors in Japanese subjects with isolated impaired fasting glucose and those with isolated impaired glucose tolerance according to 1997 and 2003 American Diabetes Association criteria.

Impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and impaired fasting glucose (IFG) are different clinical categories of abnormal glucose metabolism (1–3). Both IGT and IFG are similarly associated with increased risk of diabetes, but IGT may be more strongly associated with cardiovascular diseases (4–7). Although insulin secretion and insulin resistance have been shown to differ between these two clinical categories (8,9), mechanisms underlying the differences in the association with cardiovascular diseases are not well determined. There are only a few studies that have tried to identify differences in cardiovascular risk factors among subjects with abnormal glucose metabolism (10– 13). The definition of normal glucose tolerance (NGT), IFG, and IGT and the study populations differ among these studies, such that their results do not appear to be uniform. The aim of this study was to evaluate cardiovascular risk factors in Japanese subjects with IFG and IGT. Two diagnostic criteria defined in 1997 and in 2003 by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) (2,3) were used for the comparison. The measures included pulse-wave velocity (PWV), a noninvasive technique for assessing an aspect of atherosclerosis related to arterial stiffness (14,15).