Heart Treatment for Diabetics - Is there a Tangible Purpose?
People have always had a hard time with heart disease if they have the bad luck to go around with diabetes to begin with. Doctors have never had much to go on - medical science has three possible avenues of heart treatment to help Type II diabetes patients with - all pretty painful ones to deal with. And they haven't proved effective or safe for all the trouble either. The experts are at their wits' end trying to help heart patients who are hamstrung by diabetes. The saddest part is, that almost one in 15 Americans battles late onset diabetes - the kind you get well on in life, that brings along in tow the curable risk of a weak diseased heart.
Certainly if you find yourself in this unhappy situation, you could be forgiven for thinking that you just have to not smoke, and take a regular prescription for cholesterol and blood pressure. If only it were that simple. When diabetic people take these methods of heart treatment and exercise, they just take their level of risk from terrifyingly high levels, down to alarmingly high levels. In fact, a very careful person with diabetes and heart disease, is probably at the same level of risk for heart attacks, as a person with a healthy pancreas who has already had one.
Doctors have been trying everything they can think of - making sure that after meals, their patient doesn't get a sharp rise in blood sugar levels, keeping the good cholesterol levels up and the triglycerides down, and so on. No one really knew how much this would help, but they felt that there was no harm trying. It would appear, that doctors want to keep doing something to look useful in these cases. New studies now, show that these methods and medicines just don't help with heart treatment in the presence of diabetes; and that patients should be spared the trauma of going through unnecessary rituals with medicines.
You'll read it in the New England Journal of Medicine. What happens with the late onset diabetes is that the body becomes quite unresponsive to insulin and so, with too much blood sugar that is difficult to address, people get kidney disease, vision problems, heart disease and so on. And heart disease is the worst of them all - one in three heart attacks in America occurs to people who have diabetes - even if diabetics are only one out of ten Americans. It might seem intuitive then, that if you keep your diabetes within control, that if you watch that blood sugar level religiously, and eat right, that it should be okay. Not a chance though. They found out that if you have late onset diabetes, no amount of scrupulous control will make any difference to your heart. Heart treatment just becomes very difficult because the average Type II diabetic in America doesn't just have the diabetes and heart disease. He or she has high cholesterol levels, high levels of triglycerides, high blood pressure and high weight problems. It's just an unhappy fact that they all happen to the same person all at the same time.
The research shows that heart treatment for diabetes doesn't really have to pay all that much attention to keeping the blood sugar low, or keeping the cholesterol levels low - while those may be healthy ways to go, for your general health, it doesn't really help with your heart. So doctors may as well spare their diabetic patients the expense of all the additional medications.