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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 07 2018, @01:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the sweet-subject dept.

The American College of Physicians has issued less strict guidelines for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, but some doctors and groups like the American Diabetes Association stand by accepted practices:

Major Medical Associations Feud Over Diabetes Guidelines

A major medical association today suggested that doctors who treat people with Type 2 diabetes can set less aggressive blood sugar targets. But medical groups that specialize in diabetes sharply disagree.

Half a dozen medical groups have looked carefully at the best treatment guidelines for the 29 million Americans who have Type 2 diabetes and have come up with somewhat differing guidelines.

The American College of Physicians has reviewed those guidelines to provide its own recommendations [open, DOI: 10.7326/M17-0939] [DX], published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It has decided that less stringent goals are appropriate for the key blood sugar test, called the A1C.

Also at Reuters.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Kawumpa on Wednesday March 07 2018, @09:31AM (2 children)

    by Kawumpa (1187) on Wednesday March 07 2018, @09:31AM (#648931)

    I would generally agree with your sentiment, but recently cardiologists convinced me how flawed this argument can be. There recently was a documentary by French director Anne Georget about cholesterol and the flawed/questionable science behind statins. Cardiologists here condemned the documentary for how it allegedly misrepresented the successes of statins in preventing cardiac events. While this is true, the statements neglected to mention that statin use comes with an increased diabetes risk. So, while the use of statins may be benefical for patients with a history of cardio-vascular problems, the increased risk of developing diabetes in otherwise healthy patients, ie. just increased levels of LDL (which in itself says almost nothing about a patients health, especially not about cause and effect; see eg. the "french paradox"), makes a strong argument against using statins in those cases. To make a long story short: Sometimes experts fail to see and/or mention the whole picture due to tunnel vision and scientific reductionism.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:26PM (#649018)

    That's particularly true in the case of cardio vascular disease. There's never been any meaningful evidence that humans should be limiting their intake of sodium. The evidence for that was 6 French patients nearly a century ago that all happened to have both high blood pressure and excessive sodium intake. Similarly, while limiting cholesterol does seem to somewhat reduce the deaths do to cardiovascular diseases, it increases the risk of death by just about every other cause as well. And reducing cholesterol decreases the ability of the body to maintain flexible arteries as cholesterol is what the body uses to maintain flexibility there. Cholesterol is also involved with a large amount of hormones as a reactant.

    The amount of time that cholesterol is in the blood stream and how damaged it is when it gets incorporated into the cell walls is a big deal, it's just one that nobody really knows how to measure.

    So, in both cases, cutting them back should only be done if there's actual reason to believe that a particular patient needs it, not on the population generally as most people don't have issues with excess consumption.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Kawumpa on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:59AM

      by Kawumpa (1187) on Thursday March 08 2018, @06:59AM (#649373)

      The science many of our dietary truths or realities (of the general public) are based on appears to be so flawed that it could almost be called folk tales. See "Cholesterol - Le Grand Bluff" or "Sugar - The Bitter Truth"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM [youtube.com]) to get an idea about what's going wrong.