The NIH has pulled the plug on its ACCORD study, which involved reducing HA1C levels in diabetics to 6.0 in order to reduce cardiovascular incidents, because patients were dying from having their blood glucose reduced to normal levels! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in both alternative medicine and mainstream practice.
The AP story does a piss-poor job of addressing the issues, so I went to NIH:
Which drugs are used to lower blood sugar in ACCORD?
All major classes of drugs approved by the FDA to treat diabetes are used to treat blood sugar in both groups of the ACCORD blood sugar treatment trial – those treated to a near-normal blood sugar level as well as standard blood sugar treatment. However, the number and dosages of these drugs varied, depending on patients’ individual needs and their A1C goals. Combinations of medications could be used to achieve the A1C goals.Specific medications used included (in order of frequency of use): metformin; thiazolidinediones, or TZD’s (rosiglitazone, pioglitazone); injectable insulins; sulfonylureas (gliclazide, glimepiride, glipizide, glyburide); and acarbose and exenatide. For more information on diabetes medications, see http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/medicines_ez/index.htm.
Notice anything missing on that list? Any real basic part of any standard diabetes protocol?
Yeah. Exercise and diet.
It’s not the sugar per se that gunks up the plumbing; it’s the insulin chasing all the sugar. So dumping insulin into the system to lower glucose farther than the below-7 standard is not going to do jack. And most glucose-lowering drugs are to some degree or another poisonous. The only safe way to manage diabetes is slash sugar input and vastly increase muscle output (i.e., exercise), which is hard as hell, which is why very few of us really do it. And of course using that protocol in the study would be meaningless anyway because exercise has been proven to increase cardiovascular health, no matter what your Ha1c levels are. So what we have here is really another jackoff taxpayer-funded study. All it proves is that overusing drugs to make up for the lack-of-commitment of the patient may be counterproductive.
