Response to Comment on: Hardikar et al. Spuriously High Prevalence of Prediabetes Diagnosed by HbA1c in Young Indians Partly Explained by Hematological Factors and Iron Deficiency Anemia. Diabetes Care 2012;35:797-802

We are grateful to Schindhelm et al. (1) for their interest in our article. We measured HbA1c during follow-up of a birth cohort in the hope of substituting it for an oral glucose tolerance test. We found a discrepancy between the results of the oral glucose tolerance test (World Health Organization, 1999) and HbA1c (American Diabetes Association, 2009): A large number of individuals were classified as having “prediabetes” by HbA1c when considered normal glucose tolerant by oral glucose tolerance test (2). This prompted us to investigate possible causes of this discrepancy. We found that a number of hematological parameters (lower hemoglobin …