Aggressive Diabetes Therapy…..makes it worse…HUH? Recent L.A. Times article
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010As usual, I think it makes sense to look at things from many angles, and then make up your own mind…........................
Aggressive measures to treat diabetics make many of them worse, studies show
Rigorous treatment to bring down blood pressure and cholesterol is not beneficial and increases side effects, researchers say.
Two new reports from a major nationwide trial called ACCORD released Sunday show that lowering either blood pressure or cholesterol below current guidelines does not provide additional benefit and, in fact, increases the risk of side effects. A third arm of the study, released two years ago, shows that excessively lowering blood sugar levels actually increases the risk of heart disease.
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- I Had High Blood PressureNow it’s down to 120/75. Find out how I did it without drugs resperate.com
The results are disappointing, researchers say, because they suggest that clinicians may have reached the limit of what they can do for diabetic patients without developing new therapeutic approaches.
But the good news is, the findings “reduce the cost and potential side effects of drug therapy” and mean that patients will not have to work as hard at reducing blood sugars, lipids and blood pressure, said Dr. Denise Simons-Morton of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the trial.
“The take-home message is that the standard care approaches are pretty good. If we try to go beyond them, it doesn’t provide additional benefit,” she said.
Diabetes has become a tremendous problem in the United States, with at least 21 million people afflicted with Type 2 diabetes—in which cells do not respond properly to insulin produced by the pancreas—and millions more at risk because of obesity. Most diabetics also have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, factors that raise their risk of heart attack and stroke to the same level as that of people who already have suffered a heart attack.
Many doctors have reasoned that aggressively lowering blood pressure and lipids below nationally recommended levels might decrease the risk of heart disease, and ACCORD, or Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes, was created to study the possibility.
In one arm of the study, Dr. William C. Cushman of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Memphis, Tenn., and his colleagues at 77 medical centers enrolled 4,733 Type 2 diabetics with high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease or a high risk of developing it. They were randomly assigned to treatment regimens to lower their systolic blood pressure—the top number in a blood pressure measurement—below 140 mm Hg, the standard treatment goal for diabetics, or below 120 mm Hg, the target goal.
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