Word: risk
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...aftermath of reports concluding that these targets do not cut the risk of heart disease in diabetes patients, and in some cases may even do harm, researchers are struggling to make sense of the seemingly counterintuitive data, and physicians are trying to figure out how to incorporate the findings into their practice...
...data come from the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) trial, a three-part federal study launched a decade ago to investigate whether the aggressive lowering of those key risk factors - blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure - would reduce heart risks in diabetes and prediabetes patients. Two years ago, the blood-sugar arm of the study was terminated, when people who drastically reduced glucose levels ended up having a higher overall mortality rate than those not receiving such intensive therapy. See how to prevent illness...
...arms of the trial - one in which patients were treated with blood-pressure-lowering drugs and another in which they received statins to reduce cholesterol and fibrate medications to slice their trigylceride levels - showed the same trend, finding that aggressive drug treatment did little to reduce the volunteers' risk of developing heart problems...
...England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The results of two other related studies were also published online: one large trial also looked at the effect of reducing blood pressure in diabetes patients; another trial, involving 9,300 patients who had high blood sugar and were at high risk of developing diabetes, measured the benefit of drugs that blunt the sharp peaks and valleys in blood glucose levels that occur after eating. Neither study showed benefits of these treatments in reducing risk of heart disease...
...diabetes patients, which bolsters the reliability of their results, it doesn't mean they are the final word on the tested treatments. In the blood-fats arm of the ACCORD study, for instance, about 40% of the volunteers had already had a previous heart event and the remainder had risk factors, other than diabetes, that put them at high risk for heart disease, notes Dr. Om Ganda, director of the lipid clinic at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. That means the trial was not truly a primary-prevention study designed to test whether aggressive drug treatment could prevent a first...