If you have access to the full text of this study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, you'll see that the A1c goals in the Steno-2 study were higher than those of ACCORD, so the two studies don't necessarily contradict each other.
Nevertheless, the headlines reporting this study don't clarify: for example, "Intensive intervention benefits type 2 diabetics." Similarly, headlines reporting the ACCORD study, for example, Deaths Halt Part of Large Diabetes Trial, tend to frighten, by mentioning death instead of increasing cardiovascular risk.
This is the second lesson to learn from all this: Headlines and TV news soundbites simplify and are often misleading.
So when you hear news that could affect your health, don't panic. Try to find the source of the news, if you can. Read it critically. See if it applies to you. For example, if you're a female 60-year-old Hispanic office worker in a large city and the study was done on male 30-year-old Native American farm workers, some of the conclusions might not apply to you.
Try to look at the statistics. Are the headlines claiming that "Glucosmiraculia kills diabetics" based on a study in which two more people taking Glucosmiraculia than those taking a dummy drug died? Remember that "twice as many people died with Glucosmiraculia as with placebo" could mean that two people in 100,000 died, compared with one person in 100,000. Even if the relative risk is double, your absolute risk would still be miniscule, and if you felt a lot better on the drug, it would make sense to keep taking it.
We won't know what the ACCORD study results mean until the researchers release their full results. In the meantime, I'm sure not going to make a big effort to get my BG levels higher!
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