Samuel Dagogo-Jack, MD, DSc, chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, has written the first comprehensive textbook on prediabetes. Titled "Prediabetes: A Fundamental Text," the book was published by the American Diabetes Association on July 27, and sold out that day.
The A.C. Mullins Endowed Chair in Translational Research, Dr. Dagogo-Jack traces his research interest in prediabetes to the late 1990s, when he was the principal investigator on a diabetes prevention study at Washington University in St. Louis. The study enrolled people with prediabetes and tested various interventions, including medication and lifestyle changes, to determine their effect on the progression to diabetes.
When he joined the faculty of UTHSC in the early 2000s, he continued as the principal investigator on that study, which is ongoing today and has published more than 100 findings.
Dr. Dagogo-Jack has continued to lead numerous studies on prediabetes and diabetes with funding amounting to more than $20 million from the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association to try to understand the origin and progression of the disease.
With information gathered over decades, along with that from other researchers around the world, Dr. Dagogo-Jack began thinking about the fact that there was no definitive resource for others similarly interested in prediabetes, and certainly nothing to help translate the science related to it to frontline health care workers treating those with the condition. A comprehensive textbook did not exist.
COVID-19 gave him time to get his thoughts together, compile his observations and those of researchers from around the globe, and write the book.
The book, his seventh, explores the pathophysiology, complications, management, and reversal of prediabetes.
Dr. Dagogo-Jack hopes that the information he has compiled and logically presented will help clinicians, researchers, public health practitioners, policy makers and the public better understand prediabetes, and by extension diabetes, which afflicts 463 million people globally.
"Prediabetes: A Fundamental Text," is available through the American Diabetes Association, Amazon, and other booksellers.