A new study has found that patients with type 2 diabetes who often have fluctuating blood sugar are also at an increased risk of heart disease.
YEAR, Washington
PUBLISHED FEB 14, 2021 4:16 PM IST
Patients who suffer from type 2 diabetes and experience extreme swings in their blood sugar are at an increased risk of heart disease – a new study suggests.
The study findings are published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. The study looked at more than 29,000 patients with type 2 diabetes over a two-year period. Patients who already had heart disease were excluded.
The American Diabetes Association recommends adults with diabetes maintain an A1c, the average blood sugar level for the past two to three months, of less than 7 percent to reduce complications from diabetes, such as heart disease.
However, studies, including this one, have shown that large swings in blood sugar levels may be a better predictor of diabetic complications than the A1c value on a visit to a doctor’s office.
“The underlying mechanism for the relationship between large variations in blood sugar levels between doctor’s appointments and a high risk of heart disease in patients with type 2 diabetes is unclear,” said Gang Hu, MD, PhD, associate professor and director of the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Lab. at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
“It is possible that episodes of severely low blood sugar could be the link,” added Dr. Hu. Research has shown that wide variations in blood sugar levels are associated with poor health outcomes and even death. A 2017 Johns Hopkins study found that one-third of people with diabetes who were hospitalized for a serious episode with low blood sugar died within three years of the incident.
“We recommend that patients and their doctors implement therapies that can reduce large swings in blood sugar levels and the accompanying episodes of severely low blood sugar,” said Dr. Hu.
“Our findings suggest that measuring fluctuations in blood hemoglobin A1c levels over a period of time – for example, six months to a year – could serve as an additional blood sugar target,” he concluded.
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