Is 117 a Good Blood Sugar, or Is It Prediabetes?

A fasting blood sugar of 117 mg/dL falls squarely in the prediabetes range, regardless of which medical organization’s criteria you use. The American Diabetes Association classifies fasting glucose of 100 to 125 mg/dL as prediabetes (also called impaired fasting glucose), and the World Health Organization uses a narrower window of 110 to 125 mg/dL. At 117, you meet both thresholds. That said, “prediabetes” is not a disease in the way type 2 diabetes is, and the path forward from a reading like this is far more flexible than many people assume.

How 117 Fits Into the Diagnostic Ranges

Blood sugar categories are defined by sharp cutoff numbers, but the biology behind them is a spectrum. A fasting glucose below 100 mg/dL is considered normal. From 100 to 125 is prediabetes. At 126 or above on two separate occasions, you meet the diagnostic threshold for type 2 diabetes. Your reading of 117 sits in the upper half of the prediabetes window, closer to the diabetes line than to normal, and that positioning matters for how aggressively you might want to act.

One wrinkle worth knowing is that the ADA and the WHO draw different lines for where prediabetes begins. The ADA lowered its fasting glucose cutoff from 110 to 100 mg/dL back in 2003, a change the WHO declined to adopt because evidence of benefit from diagnosing people in that 100 to 109 range was thin.¹ That single policy difference dramatically changes how many people carry the label. In one large study, about 40% of participants qualified as prediabetic under ADA rules, compared with only 16% under WHO rules.² At 117, though, you clear both bars comfortably, so the debate over where to draw the lower boundary does not apply to you.

Before You Worry, Check the Reading’s Accuracy

If that 117 came from a home glucose meter rather than a lab draw, it is worth pausing before drawing conclusions. Home meters measure glucose from a finger-prick capillary sample, not from a vein, and the two do not always agree. One long-running analysis found an average gap of about 11 mg/dL between capillary and venous readings, with high variability from one test to the next.³ That means a meter reading of 117 could reflect a true venous glucose anywhere from roughly 106 to 128, which ranges from mild prediabetes to borderline diabetes. A single reading on a home device is not enough to anchor a diagnosis.

Timing matters too. A true “fasting” glucose means no calories for at least eight hours, typically measured first thing in the morning. But even under proper fasting conditions, your body naturally nudges blood sugar upward in the early morning hours. Hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and growth hormone shift overnight, prompting the liver to release more glucose in anticipation of waking activity. This so-called dawn phenomenon was documented decades ago in people with perfectly normal glucose regulation.⁴ If you tested right as you woke up, you may have caught your sugar near its daily peak. A reading taken an hour or two later, still fasting, could be a few points lower. None of this means 117 should be dismissed, but it does mean one data point is not a verdict. A lab-drawn fasting glucose, ideally repeated, gives a much clearer picture.

What Is Actually Going Wrong at 117

Prediabetes is often described as “your body starting to struggle with blood sugar,” which is vague enough to be unhelpful. The underlying problem when fasting glucose creeps up is more specific than that. Your liver continuously produces glucose, even while you sleep, and insulin’s job is to keep that production in check. In people with impaired fasting glucose, the liver becomes somewhat resistant to insulin’s braking signal. Research comparing people with normal fasting glucose to those with impaired fasting glucose found that the higher readings were driven by increased gluconeogenesis, the liver’s process of making new glucose, even though overall glucose output and disposal looked similar on the surface. The insulin resistance in these individuals was described as mild, concentrated mainly in the liver’s response during fasting conditions.⁵

This is actually somewhat reassuring. At the impaired-fasting-glucose stage, your muscles and other tissues are often still handling sugar reasonably well after meals. The problem is more narrowly focused on what the liver does overnight. That distinction matters because it suggests the metabolic machinery has not broken down broadly; it has developed a specific weak point that targeted changes can address.

Will 117 Turn Into Diabetes?

This is usually the first question people ask after getting a prediabetes reading, and the honest answer is: probably not, if you make changes, and even without changes, the odds are not as grim as many people fear. A large pooled analysis of 19 studies found that within ten years, people with prediabetes had about a 12.5% chance of progressing to type 2 diabetes, while roughly 36% reverted to normal blood sugar on their own.⁶ In other words, reversion to normal was nearly three times more common than progression to diabetes across the full prediabetes spectrum.

The picture changes, though, when you look at where in the range someone falls. Among people in the highest quartile of fasting glucose, progression jumped to about 16% over ten years, and the chance of reverting dropped to roughly 13%.⁶ At 117, you are in the upper half of the ADA range. That does not guarantee you are in the highest-risk quartile, since the exact quartile boundaries depend on the study population, but it does place you closer to that group than someone at 103. A separate study of nearly 3,800 people with impaired fasting glucose found that about 6% developed diabetes within just three years.⁷ These numbers reinforce that prediabetes is a warning, not a sentence, but the higher end of the range deserves more attention than the lower end.

Cardiovascular Risk at This Stage

Diabetes gets most of the attention, but prediabetes also carries increased cardiovascular risk even if it never progresses. Impaired fasting glucose tends to cluster with other metabolic problems. In a study of a Nigerian population, people with impaired fasting glucose had the highest rates of co-occurring dyslipidemia (abnormal cholesterol or triglycerides), followed by overweight or obesity and high blood pressure.⁸ This clustering is not coincidental. The same insulin resistance that pushes fasting glucose up also tends to drive triglycerides higher, blood pressure upward, and HDL cholesterol lower. If your doctor found a fasting glucose of 117, it is worth asking about the rest of your metabolic profile, not just your blood sugar in isolation.

What You Can Do About It

The strongest evidence for reversing prediabetes comes from the Diabetes Prevention Program, a landmark trial involving over a thousand participants (nearly half from racial and ethnic minority groups). The lifestyle arm of the study targeted two goals: losing at least 7% of body weight and getting at least 150 minutes per week of moderate physical activity like brisk walking. Participants who hit those targets saw a 58% reduction in their rate of developing diabetes.⁹ That is a larger effect than most medications produce for most chronic conditions.

Between the two goals, weight loss appears to be the bigger driver. A more recent analysis from a diabetes prevention program found that even mild to moderate weight loss lowered A1C levels more than physical activity did on its own in people with prediabetes.¹⁰ That does not mean exercise is unimportant. Physical activity improves insulin sensitivity through mechanisms that weight loss alone does not fully replicate, and the two together are more effective than either in isolation. But if you are looking for the single highest-impact change, modest weight loss gets you the most metabolic improvement per unit of effort.

Diet composition also matters beyond just calories. In a controlled study of people with impaired fasting glucose, those assigned to a higher-carbohydrate, lower-fat diet saw their fasting glucose drop and their beta-cell function improve, while those on a lower-carbohydrate, higher-fat diet did not see the same benefit.¹¹ This might seem counterintuitive, since carbohydrates directly raise blood sugar. But the type of carbohydrate and the overall dietary pattern matter more than the macronutrient ratio alone. Whole grains, legumes, and vegetables are carbohydrates, and they behave very differently in the body than refined sugars. Meanwhile, separate research found that cutting out high-energy refined grains improved the odds of returning to normal fasting glucose, and that including high-fat dairy did the same.¹² The takeaway is less about any single macronutrient and more about food quality: swapping processed foods for whole ones consistently improves fasting glucose.

Medications That Can Push Fasting Glucose Up

If you are on certain medications, your 117 may be partly drug-induced rather than purely metabolic. Several common drug classes are known to raise blood sugar. Corticosteroids like prednisone are probably the most notorious, but the list also includes certain blood pressure medications (particularly thiazide diuretics and some beta-blockers), antipsychotic drugs, statins, and some immunosuppressants.¹³ If you are taking any of these and your fasting glucose recently climbed into the prediabetes range, it is worth discussing with your prescriber whether the medication could be contributing. That does not necessarily mean stopping the drug, since the condition it treats may be more dangerous than a few extra points of blood sugar, but it changes the interpretation of the number.

Why Your A1C and Fasting Glucose Might Tell Different Stories

Many people with a fasting glucose of 117 get an A1C test and find the result looks reassuringly normal, or vice versa. The two tests measure different things. Fasting glucose is a snapshot of what your blood sugar is doing right now, while A1C reflects your average blood sugar over roughly three months. They often agree, but they do not have to. The relationship between fasting glucose and A1C varies by age and by race and ethnicity. In a large U.S. dataset, Black individuals had higher A1C values than white individuals at the same fasting glucose level, and people over 50 had higher A1C at the same fasting glucose compared to younger adults.¹⁴ Similar patterns have been documented across Asian ethnic groups, where the steepness of the glucose-to-A1C relationship differs between populations even after accounting for factors like waist circumference and cholesterol.¹⁵

This has practical consequences. If you are Black and your fasting glucose is 117, your A1C may be proportionally higher than it would be for a white person with the same fasting glucose, which could tip you into the prediabetes A1C range (5.7% or above) even if your glucose control is functionally similar. In children and adolescents, the disconnect can go the other direction: one study found that among 55 children who developed impaired fasting glucose, only 16 had an A1C above 5.7%.¹⁶ The mismatch between the two markers is a well-known limitation of diabetes screening, and it means relying on one test alone can miss the full picture.

What Continuous Glucose Monitors Reveal in Non-Diabetic People

Continuous glucose monitors, the small sensors that stick to the arm and track glucose every few minutes, have become increasingly popular among health-conscious people who do not have diabetes. Wearing one when your fasting glucose is 117 can be eye-opening, though the data need careful interpretation. These devices show glucose variability throughout the day, the spikes after meals, the dips during exercise, and the slow climb overnight. Researchers have begun exploring whether that variability itself carries health risks even in people without diabetes, though the evidence connecting glucose swings to cardiovascular or metabolic harm in non-diabetic populations is still unclear.¹⁷

What a CGM can usefully show someone with a fasting glucose of 117 is which foods and meals drive the biggest post-meal spikes, and how quickly their glucose returns to baseline. That kind of personalized feedback often motivates dietary changes more effectively than a single lab number does. Just keep in mind that CGM readings carry their own measurement error, and the consumer devices marketed to non-diabetic users are not held to the same accuracy standards as medical-grade monitors. The trend data is useful; fixating on any single five-minute reading is not.

When to Retest and What to Ask For

If your fasting glucose came back at 117, your doctor will likely want to confirm it with at least one more fasting test, and possibly an A1C or an oral glucose tolerance test. The oral glucose tolerance test, where you drink a glucose solution and have blood drawn two hours later, gives information about how your body handles a sugar load that fasting glucose alone cannot reveal. Some people have normal fasting glucose but abnormal post-meal responses, and vice versa. Because 117 is clearly in the prediabetes range, most clinicians will also check your lipid panel, blood pressure, and waist circumference to assess your broader metabolic risk rather than treating the glucose reading as an isolated number.

How often to retest depends on what you do next. If you make meaningful lifestyle changes, rechecking in three to six months is reasonable to see whether your numbers have moved. If your fasting glucose stays above 110 despite sustained effort, or if your A1C continues to rise, that trajectory matters more than any single reading. Prediabetes management is less about hitting a specific number on one test and more about the direction the numbers are moving over time.