The American Medical Association today published the results of a large and long study that is good news for anyone who has diabetes. The study shows that intensive control substantially lowers the risk of some serious complications of diabetes. No surprise that intensive control works. But the surp...
Diabetes Intensive Therapy Lowers Retinopathy, Nephropathy, Heart Complications
7/29/09 9:55pm
I have had type 1 diabetes for over 40 years and have no major complications from the disease. Your article that discussed tight control due to diabetes management is actually only one of the factors that helped me achieve this but there is a downside to this tight control as I have found.
Other factors that helped me achive the tight control include genetics and a very strong support system from my family as well as tough decisions I had to make to keep me as well as I am. My healthcare team was, of course, a big motivating aspect to provide the impetus and goals for me to keep tight control.
The main downside I experienced though includes passing out from the low blood sugars. Unfortunately, since I have had diabetes so long and ran into hypoglycemic unawareness I had numerous car accidents over the years and lost numerous jobs as well. In addition, the stress I experienced from my marriage exaggerated the passing out and since the marriage ended I have had much better control and much less passing out episodes.
Sort of a sad price to pay for tight control though. Don't you think?
7/30/09 10:31am
7/30/09 12:58pm
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It's interesting to compare the findings of different research projects.
Relationship of Hemoglobin A1C and Mortality in Heart Failure Patients With Diabetes
For those who don't have access to the full text Nephropal has put some of the details on his blog.
Although this may appear to be a contradictory finding I think a closer look at the diabetes control program Aguilar uses for Veterans is very drugs orientated. I don't see any mention of using an anti inflammatory diet or correcting vitamin d, omega 3 magnesium deficiency. Veterans are not told to reduce inflammatory carbohydrate or reduce to 4% of calories the pro inflammatory omega 6 vegetable oil intake.
My view is that the natural approach adopted by Bernstein and Mary Vernon to achieving low A1c's is more likely to achieve better results than the drugs based approach recommended for veterans.
Agree with Ted. The studies done by drug companies that purport to show a benefit for tight control of BG levels in type 2s by means of drugs are not honestly reported. Until all these studies report their results in terms of absolute reduction of risk instead of relative reduction of risk (which is a meaningless statistic), then I don't believe them. If it were up to the pharmaceutical companies, we would all be labeled diabetic, hypertensive, and having high cholesterol and be consumers of their products for most of our adult lives.
If you examine the results of the major studies done over the years closely, you find that there has been no proof that taking these drugs improves the important, long-term outcomes in terms of reducing major risks.
I am afraid that lowering BG levels by means of drugs, just masks the underlying disease and does nothing to slow its progress. It might be like using a drug to suppress a cough without treating the pneumonia. If that is true, then people with type 2 diabetes are being ill served by the medical community.
If There is No Benefit, Why Tolerate Any Risk?
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=3232247&page=1
Objective reporting on many health subjects: http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/