Word: trials
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...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...
...results of the remaining two 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...
...findings were published online in the New 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...
...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 heart attack in newly diagnosed diabetes patients...
Another reason these patients showed no significant heart benefits, he says, may be that most of them never needed the fibrate to begin with. About two-thirds of the patients in the trial already had triglyceride levels below those at which doctors would normally prescribe the drug, which skewed the study results toward the negative side...