Browsing Tag

Highs And Lows

Diabetes Complications

Intensive Control Does Work

All over the world people with diabetes are slacking off how well they control their diabetes. Their A1C levels are climbing to 7.0 percent or more, apparently blessed by scientific research.

Researchers designed the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes trial, universally known as ACCORD, hoped to prove that we would have fewer heart attacks and strokes when we able to bring our A1C levels below 6.0 percent. Instead, they were surprised to discover that 257 patients in the intensive-therapy group died, compared with 203 patients in the standard-therapy group. Consequently, they terminated the intensive therapy regime 17 months before the scheduled end of the study.
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Diabetes Medication

Diabetes Drug Dangers

A single research report that found risks in one of the medications that we take to control our diabetes would warrant our attention. But when three separate studies find serious side effects from all our major drugs, the time is right for us to reconsider how we control our blood glucose levels.

Most of us think of our diabetes drugs, diet, and exercise as the three basic ways we do that. But drugs come first. Maybe they should come last, at least for all of us with type 2 diabetes, who unlike type 1s have a choice.

Since March 10, studies have called into question the side effects of metformin, the glitazones, insulin, and the sulfonylureas.
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Psychosocial

Saving our Brains

Many of us who have diabetes are more in tune with our minds than our bodies. We are “not athletic.” Many of us will frankly acknowledge that we are “into our heads.”

Now its clear that we can’t have a good head on our shoulders without having good shoulders and all. Our diabetic body will give us a diabetic mind — if we let it. And when we control our diabetes, not only our bodies but also our brains work better.

A diabetic body has high blood glucose. When we succeed in bringing our blood glucose level down to normal, our bodies aren’t diabetic any more. When our diabetes is controlled, it may not be cured, but it’s certainly in such remission that no tests would show that it’s diabetic.
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Diabetes Testing

Testing Cholesterol at Home

Just yesterday I got my first home cholesterol and triglyceride test results. It took three weeks for them to get back to me after I mailed them in. That’s acceptable.

But I have been waiting years to be able to check these levels at home. That’s not good.

The new Check Up America test from Home Access Health Corp. in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, is the only way that we can check our cholesterol levels — total, HDL (good), and LDL (bad) — at home. With the same blood sample it also checks our triglyceride levels and A1C.
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Diabetes Testing

The Normal A1C Level

You want to control your diabetes as much as possible. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t.

So you regularly check your A1C level. This is the best measurement of our blood glucose control that we have now. It tells us what percentage of our hemoglobin — the protein in our red blood cells that carry oxygen — has glucose sticking to it. The less glucose that remains in our bloodstream rather than going to work in the cells that need it the better we feel now and the better our health will continue to be.

As we are able to control our diabetes better and better, the reasonable goal is to bring our A1C levels down to normal — the A1C level that people who don’t have diabetes have. But before we can even set that goal, we have to know what the target is.
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Diabetes Testing

The First Bluetooth Meter

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a bluetooth blood glucose meter. Almost all cell phones and computers sold today support Bluetooth technology that lets us connect devices like blood glucose meters without using any wires.

Three different bluetooth standards permit connections between devices separated from about 1 meter to about 100 meters. In the past two and one-half years I’ve been so exciting about the prospect of automatically connecting our meters to cell phones and computers that I’ve written about three companies that promised us bluetooth meters.

Just like cures for diabetes and wonder drug that will let us perfectly control it, many of the announced devices never make it through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and come to market. As far as I have been able to determine, theGlucoTel device that I wrote about in Diabetes Health magazine in October 2006 didn’t make it here.
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