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In their commentary on the impact of new guidelines for glucose tolerance testing, Andrew Lyon and associates1 argue against increased use of the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) on the grounds of poor reproducibility, cumbersomeness and questionable cost-effectiveness. They rightly conclude that devoting resources to programs that can help patients to modify their risk for diabetes is preferable to performing more OGTTs. However, it would have been appreciated if they had considered the simplified or abbreviated version of the glucose tolerance test2,3 in terms of its suitability for detecting new cases of diabetes; this form of the test would be both reliable and less expensive.