What Does Your Voice Say About Your Diabetes Risk?

When it comes to testing for diabetes risk, the main thing people look to is blood sugar testing, but let’s face it, how many people do that before a doctor tells them it’s already near-certain?

Well, some do, and depending on how non-diabetic people go about this, it can be useful or not:

• Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health
• Continuous Glucose Monitors Without Diabetes: Pros & Cons
• Why You Might Not Want A Continuous Glucose Monitor

And yet, blood sugar levels will only indicate diabetes when the disease is already well underway, in terms of its actual pathogenesis.

So, insulin testing can actually get more useful information delivered much earlier, because insulin resistance shows up long before blood sugar levels start mishaving.

We talked about that when we reviewed a book on the topic by Dr. Benjamin Bikman:

❝Dr. Bikman makes the case that while indeed hyper- or hypoglycemia bring their problems, mostly these are symptoms rather than causes, and the real culprit is insulin resistance, and this is important for two main reasons:

1. Insulin resistance occurs well before the other symptoms set in (which means: it is the thing that truly needs to be nipped in the bud; if your fasting blood sugars are rising, then you missed “nipping it in the bud” likely by a decade or more)
2. Insulin resistance causes more problems than “mere” hyperglycemia (the most commonly-known result of insulin resistance) does, so again, it really needs to be considered separately from blood sugar management.

This latter, Dr. Bikman goes into in great detail, linking insulin resistance (even if blood sugar levels are normal) to all manner of diseases (hence the title).

You may be wondering: how can blood sugar levels be normal, if we have insulin resistance?

And the answer is that for as long as it is still able, your pancreas will just faithfully crank out more and more insulin to deal with the blood sugar levels that would otherwise be steadily rising. Since people measure blood sugar levels much more regularly than anyone checks for actual insulin levels, this means that one can be insulin resistant for years without knowing it, until finally the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the demand—then that’s when people finally notice.❞

You can read the full book review here:

Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease and How to Fight It – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman

Now, testing for insulin is not so quick, easy, or accessible as testing for glucose, but it can be worthwhile to order such a test—because, as discussed, your insulin levels could be high even while your blood sugars are still normal, and it won’t be until the pancreas finally reaches breaking point that your blood sugars show it.

So, knowing your insulin levels can help you intervene before your pancreas reaches that breaking point.

But still, that’s not exactly the most accessible thing, is it?

In the palm of your hand

All so recently, researchers (Dr. Boujemaa Guermazi et al.) analyzed 14,759 smartphone voice recordings from 461 adults to identify vocal patterns associated with type 2 diabetes, using spectrograms and an Audio Spectrogram Transformer to detect complex acoustic patterns.

As for how accurate this was: these voice-based models achieved a balanced accuracy of 71.3% for women and 72.4% for men.

You can read about it here: V2D: Detection of type 2 diabetes using only smartphone voice recordings via spectro-temporal transformer embeddings

Now, this isn’t witchcraft; it has to do with recognizing combinations of sound patterns across frequencies and time, going beyond predefined voice characteristics such as pitch, shimmer, and jitter, building on previous work by the same lab, associating specific patterns with blood sugar level variations specifically:

Linear effects of glucose levels on voice fundamental frequency in type 2 diabetes and individuals with normoglycemia

It reminds of the similar technology we wrote about in: The Cough Doctor

Want to learn more?

If you’d rather just focus on reducing your risk, you might like to consider:

3 Tweaks To Cut Diabetes Risk By 1/3

Take care!