Low Blood Sugar Symptoms
Harvard has finally taken interest in a study performed on diabetics (called ACCORD). I say finally because the study was published two years ago and it showed us something very important: Some people with type II diabetes should not be given too many medications at once. In ACCORD, People who were trying to be good, who did what their doctor ordered when prescribed an aggressive regimen of diabetes medications, were at higher risk of dying than those who didn’t comply or were treated less aggressively.
For the past two years, most medical policy leaders have ignored these findings, claiming the study was flawed. Shame on them.
It’s about time diabetes specialists take this issue seriously.
What they admitted at the May meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists was that the finding that patients on more aggressive treatment died more often than those who didn’t get the aggressive treatment was the opposite of what they expected and “nobody saw it coming.” (Are you getting tired of hearing that?)
The patients who were more likely to die were those who started out with higher A1c numbers and had such bad diabetes that as many as four medications failed to push their numbers under 7.0. (A1c is a measure of blood sugar control, normal numbers are under 5.7, over 8.0 indicates poor control of diabetes).
They’re not sure why people died, in fact, they’re still calling it a mystery (see reference, below). But it’s not really that mysterious if you think about it from a whole-person perspective.
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