A new discovery could lead to a simple, routine test for detecting the subtle onset of diabetes, say scientists.

Johns Hopkins scientists discovered a dramatic increase of an easy-to-detect enzyme in the red blood cells of people with diabetes and pre-diabetes - up to two to three times higher in people with diabetes and pre-diabetes than in those with no disease.

“That’s a big difference, especially in an enzyme that’s as tightly regulated as this one is,” says Gerald Hart, Ph.D., the DeLamar Professor and director of biological chemistry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Hart speculates that in diabetes and pre-diabetes, it’s not a good thing for the increased amount of sugar to be attached to proteins, so the cell is responding by elevating the enzyme that gets rid of it.

He added that his team’s pilot studies encourage further investigation of a method that potentially could fill the void that currently exists for an easy, accurate routine test for pre-diabetes.