I happen to be listening to a radio program on my local NPR station and an endo said that a recent study was stopped because it showed no benefit for heart disease prevention by having very tight glucose controls.
Has anyone else heard about this?
i haven't heard this, but i can potentially see why it's true. a lot goes into heart disease, so i can see how factors like diet and exercise could be more prominent than tight diabetes control.
Damned if you do....damned if you don't.....sorry.....I have a bad attitude today:(
That is an interesting point.
This info kind of bothered me because my daughter's glucose has been kind of high lately. We have fewer lows but there are days
she is over 200. Last night she had a swim meet and that always raises her sugar. Then she had a slice of Dominoes pizza for which we gave her insulin
and she stayed about 240 all evening. We were afraid to treat the high again just before bed so we let it go. She woke up at 106.
sounds like you did the right thing :o) pizza and nerves/adrenaline are tricky for every diabetic (as i'm sure you've noticed). i had the opposite problem last night. went to bed normal (ate a small snack), woke up at 3am low, then got up at 7:45am in the 300s. even after 20 years i can't always figure it out!
I think I heard something similar recently about heart disease, but I can't remember where I saw / heard it. I don't think I heard the details. It's scary b/c I try to exercise, eat healthy, etc, but it makes you feel out of control with being able to prevent a cardiovascular problem!
But, tight control is still shown to be important in reducing the risks of other complications, so it's still worth the effort!
[quote user="Sarah"]But, tight control is still shown to be important in reducing the risks of other complications, so it's still worth the effort![/quote]
Agreed. I'd rather keep my A1C levels under 7 than increase my risk of blindness, amputation, and kidney failure. It's no solace to avoid heart disease when those things have a greater chance of happening.
My mother had a heart attack, followed by quadruple bypass surgery about a month ago. Her type 2 diabetes has always been under great control, but heart disease runs in her family. Like C said, there are many other, perhaps more predominant factors - stress, family history, diet, excersise, smoking - that come into play.
C--
That happens to me too and I'm a T1 for 34 years now. Sometimes it seems no matter how hard you try, your body has a mind of it's own!
I had the exact same scenario happen to me last night! I've been using the sensor but sometimes I'm too sleepy to hear the alerts going off during the night. Sometimes the harder I workout, the higher my blood sugars sky-rocket. I always get low when doing lower intensity such as brisk walking. I feel like this limits me though because I want to be able to run, etc. Does this happen with anyone else? Is this the adrenaline you were talking about?
I believe the study being referred to was done mostly on older folks (the average age was 62) and what they found was that tighter control did not lower the risk of heart problems (attack, stroke, etc). In fact, tighter control was associated with slightly higher risk. So according to the study, once you are in your 60s or so you can loosen your control a bit to maybe about an a1c of 7%. This doesn't give you license to do whatever you want, have a high a1c, not take your meds, etc. It simply seems to imply that as you get older, tighter control is not quite as important as when you are younger and that as you get to a more senior age, too tight control can cause some damage.
Cora
Last fall I saw a new endrocrinologist at Johns Hopkins and she had her nurse practicioner call me to keep tabs. She was upset that sometimes I wouldn't always follow the bolus wizard for the pump regarding corrections and I said that some days you are just running low and some days you are just running high and no matter what you do sometimes it just doesn't turn out. I said I didn't want to blindly follow the machine if I thought it was incorrect. I don't even know why she was questioning this because my A1C was 6 and I was hardly ever high and sometimes low, but that wasn't a very big problem. She couldn't accept the explanation that sometimes there is just no reason for things and she said of course there was and that I needed to try harder to figure it out. After almost 20 years of being type 1 I think I have a pretty good idea of what my body is telling me. It was very frustrating and I switched doctors because I could never get in touch with the actual doctor. I just feel like I wanted to share this since I am trying a new doctor in a few weeks and I hope this turns out better!
I am 70 years old now and I am having a hard time resisting the urge to exercise the way I used to 10 years ago. I was climbing a ladder yesterday so I could clean out the gutters. My legs were having a hard time with that and I felt weak. I try to walk 3 miles in an hour on roads with hills. I cannot do that now. I get mild pains in my chest when I do. I know I can slow down and walk 2.5 miles and be OK. When will I learn? Part of my tight control has always been daily exercise, but that could give me a heart attack if I try to push myself too hard.