Women with “pre-diabetes” may show signs of impending heart trouble long before the same warning signs show up in men, a new study suggests.

As its name implies, pre-diabetes is a precursor to type 2 diabetes; it’s recognized when a person’s blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to diagnose diabetes.

In the new study, published in the journal Diabetes Care, researchers found that women, but not men, showed certain markers of blood-vessel abnormalities an average of 6 years before developing pre-diabetes.

It’s known that women with diabetes have a higher risk of heart disease than their male counterparts do, and the new study raises the question of whether early circulatory abnormalities contribute to women’s greater risks.

This possibility should be studied further, lead study author Dr. Richard P. Donahue told Reuters Health.

Donahue and his colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo based their findings on 1,455 adults who were free of diabetes and heart disease at the study’s outset. Over the next 6 years, 52 women and 39 men went from having normal blood sugar to pre-diabetes levels.

Among these subjects with pre-diabetes, women but not men had shown generally higher blood levels of a protein involved in blood clotting and of two proteins that indicate reduced elasticity of blood vessels - a problem known as endothelial dysfunction.

Despite the connections, though, it’s premature to suggest that women have these blood proteins measured, Donahue said. The findings need to be confirmed by additional studies, he explained, and right now few labs even do the tests used in this study.

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, February 2007.