Occurring as a result of both lifestyle and genetic factors, type 2 diabetes is a serious chronic disease that can give rise to complications including blindness, heart disease and kidney failure. About 2 million Canadians have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but an estimated 400 000 who have the disease have not yet been diagnosed. A further estimated five million more have prediabetes, where blood sugar levels are elevated, but not high enough for a diabetes diagnosis. Diabetes often remains undetected for years before clinical diagnosis, and many newly diagnosed persons already exhibit signs of diabetic complications. The age-standardized prevalence of diagnosed diabetes has been climbing by an average of 7 percent per year over the past decade. While many lifestyle risk factors for diabetes are modifiable, for example, by increasing physical activity or losing excess weight, genetic factors such as family history and ethnicity cannot be changed. Yet even “non-modifiable” factors are important, since they interact with other risk factors to affect one’s overall diabetes risk. Risk assessment tries to weigh the combined effect of all possible risk factors, not only the obvious ones like obesity, gender and age.