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2 Different Findings on Type-2 Diabetics! When talking about heart disease prevention, diabetes is a risk factor that one should never ignore. Besides heart disease, diabetes could also lead to blindness, kidney disease, and many other medical disorders. During February 2008, 2 separate studies, dubbed Accord and Advance respectively, had released 2 different findings on Type-2 diabetics. Accord, being a large United States sponsored study, showed a slight increase of death in diabetics whose blood sugar had been reduced to near-normal levels, whereas Advance, an international study, had found no sign that intensive treatment would increase the risk of death. The Accord trial involved 10,251 patients and was led and organized by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. The patients participated were older adults with an average age of 62 who had Type-2 diabetes for more than 10 years. Participants were divided into 2 groups. One group was given aggressive treatment to lower their blood sugar levels (a measure known as hemoglobin A l c) to below 6 percent, far below the existing target of under 7 percent, which was closer to that in non-diabetics. The other group was given appropriate treatment to keep their A l c levels to the range between 7 and 7.9 percent.
It was found that patients in the first group died at a higher rate than the second group. As a result, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute announced that they would stop the tight glucose control group of the Accord study and move patients into the second group with less-aggressive treatment. The findings of Accord certainly contradicted the conventional reasoning about diabetes control: lowering blood glucose to the normal range would reduce the risk of patients of getting heart attacks, as well as kidney disease, nerve damage and blindness. The Advance study was run by the University of Sydney's George Institute for International Health. It involved 11,140 high-risk patients with Type-2 diabetes. The study aimed to find out if intensive treatment to lower blood pressure and reduce blood glucose would improve the health of patients with Type-2 diabetes. As with the Accord study, the Advance study intended to lower blood glucose levels to below the current recommendations. The target for their patients was to keep the A1c levels to below 6.5 percent. The blood sugar section of the study was completed in January 2008. According to the study's data monitoring and safety committee, the Advance results were based on more than twice as much data and similar levels of glucose control as in the Accord study. Meanwhile, the researchers of the study also indicated that the results were more than 99 percent complete and were confident that the interim findings were a reliable guide to the final reports yet to be published. Nevertheless, one thing that was not clear is whether the patients in both studies were taking the same drugs to lower their blood sugar.
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