Word: heart
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...great as earlier data has indicated and that doctors may be screening diabetes patients to no benefit. Reporting from a group of institutions in the U.S. and Canada, researchers involved in the Detection of Ischemia in Asymptomatic Diabetics (DIAD) study found that screening diabetes patients for heart risk fails to predict which patients are most likely to have a heart attack. DIAD also found that the risk of heart disease among diabetes patients may be exaggerated overall, according to the data published April 14 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...Based on the number of type 2 diabetes patients who typically go on to develop heart problems, DIAD researchers began with the assumption that as many as 60% of the study's 1,123 volunteers with diabetes, who showed no outward signs of heart disease, might be harboring silent heart problems. Researchers expected that screening these patients - using the common treadmill stress test and then imaging their hearts - would help root out any heart abnormalities, such as early blockages or irregular heart rhythms, quickly enough to be treated before leading to a potentially deadly cardiac event. (Read "The Year...
...proved our expectations three times wrong," says Dr. Frans Wackers, professor of diagnostic radiology and medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and an author of the DIAD study. "We found to our surprise that there was not an increase in heart abnormalities among diabetic patients, but actually fewer abnormalities. And the next surprising thing was that this was true in both the group that received screening and the group that received no screening...
...Among the patients who were screened, 5.5% needed procedures, such as bypass or angioplasty, to restore blood flow to the heart during the course of the trial. A similar proportion, 7.8%, of unscreened patients required similar procedure. The difference was not statistically significant, meaning that the screening did little to predict or prevent heart problems in diabetes patients...
...that screening didn't appear to provide any health advantage, Wackers theorizes, may be that patients with diabetes (particularly the ones being monitored carefully in the study) are already benefiting from well controlled blood sugar - in patients, both with diabetes and without, high blood sugar is associated with increased heart risk. So, if diabetes patients are already being treated for potential heart risk factors before they become hazardous, screening becomes redundant...