Research

Hormonal

In adults with prediabetes, women experience less sustained weight loss and greater loss of fat-free mass and bone mineral content compared to men during long-term lifestyle interventions, despite showing greater improvements in some cardiometabolic markers like fasting glucose and HDL.

Women in this study lost less weight and more muscle/bone than men following the same lifestyle program. To mitigate this, women should prioritize resistance training and protein intake to protect lean mass, and focus on metabolic improvements (like blood sugar and cholesterol) rather than just scale weight, as these may improve even if weight loss is modest.

GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
compared with men, women had less weight loss... with greater fat-free mass and bone mass loss and smaller improvements in HbA1c, LDL-cholesterol and diastolic blood pressure.
Ruixin Zhu et al. · Diabetologia · 2022

Why this rating

Large-scale RCT (n=2223) with long-term follow-up (3 years), observational post-hoc analysis.

Source

Age- and sex-specific effects of a long-term lifestyle intervention on body weight and cardiometabolic health markers in adults with prediabetes: results from the diabetes prevention study PREVIEW

Ruixin Zhu et al. · Diabetologia · 2022

DOI 10.1007/s00125-022-05716-3

rct · n=2223Cited 33×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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