Earlier Blood sugar control in Diabetes lowers risk of death and heart attack: Study

People who get type 2 diabetes need to gain control of their blood-sugar levels -- fast. The years immediately after diagnosis are strikingly critical in terms of their future risk for heart attacks and death. This is shown by a joint study from the Universities of Gothenburg and Oxford.

The researchers examined relationships of all cause mortality and myocardial infarction with prior individual HbA1c values and explored the potential impact of instituting earlier, compared with delayed, blood sugar lowering therapy.In a collaboration between the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University of Oxford in the UK, the significance of blood sugar levels from the time type 2 diabetes is diagnosed for the risk of heart attacks and death has been studied. The project was led jointly by Professor Marcus Lind in Gothenburg and Professor Rury Holman in Oxford.

"These latest results are evidence that proper early blood-sugar treatment in type 2 diabetes is crucial to optimise diabetes care. Previously we haven't performed this kind of analysis, or understood just how important early blood-sugar control is for the prognosis. They also mean that there is a need for a greater focus on detecting type 2 diabetes at the earliest opportunity to prevent people living with undetected high blood-sugar levels for several years," says Professor Marcus Lind.

Professor Rury Holman, from the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, said "These new results provide a mechanistic explanation for the glycaemic 'legacy effect', first identified by the UKPDS, whereby instituting good blood-sugar control in newly-diagnosed type 2 diabetes was shown to reduce the risks of diabetic complications and death for up to 30 years. The discovery of the 'legacy effect' has led treatment guidelines worldwide recommending the need to achieve good blood-glucose control as soon as possible".