By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 19, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- People with type 1 diabetes faced a much higher risk of dying over the course of a 14-year study than people without the disease, Swedish researchers report.
The good news was that the closer someone with type 1 diabetes got to their blood sugar goals (glycemic control), the lower the risk of dying. The bad news was that even those with the best blood sugar management still had roughly double the risk of dying from any cause or a heart disease-related cause.
"What our study shows, which is important to emphasize, is that glycemic control seems to be really crucial for prognosis. For those with very poor glycemic control, the risks of dying were eight to 10 times increased," said study author Dr. Marcus Lind, an associate professor at the University of Gothenberg and chief physician of diabetology at Uddevalla Hospital in Sweden.
The risk of dying during the study was dramatically higher -- 30 to 40 times higher -- for people with severe kidney disease, according to Lind. One bright spot in the report was that the researchers found no increased risk of dying from cancer for people with type 1 diabetes.
Lind and his colleagues reported their findings in the Nov. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition that causes the destruction of the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, leaving people unable to produce insulin, according to JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). Insulin is a hormone that's crucial for moving sugar out of the blood and into cells for fuel. That means people with type 1 diabetes must figure out how much insulin they need every time they eat, and then inject insulin with a needle, or use an insulin pump to deliver insulin through a small tube that needs to be re-inserted underneath the skin every few days.
In the current study, Lind and his colleagues followed nearly 34,000 people with type 1 diabetes from 1998 through 2011. The researchers compared each person to five people who were matched for age, sex and county of residence.
The average age of those included in the study was nearly 36. Forty-five percent were women. The average duration of type 1 diabetes was 20 years, according to the study.
During the study follow-up, 8 percent of those with diabetes died compared to 3 percent of those without the disease.
Men -- both with diabetes and without -- were more likely to die during the study period. And, the older someone was -- again with diabetes or without -- the more likely they were to die during the study period.
But, for every gender and for every age, people with type 1 diabetes were significantly more likely to die of a heart disease-related cause or any cause than people without diabetes, the investigators found.
The differences really became obvious, however, when the researchers broke the data down by blood sugar management. They looked at a measurement called hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C), which gives a rough estimate of a person's blood sugar levels over the past two to three months, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA).
For many people with type 1 diabetes, the ADA's target goal is an HbA1C under 7 percent. People with type 1 diabetes with an HbA1C of 6.9 percent or less had twice the risk of dying from any cause during the study, and a three times higher risk of dying from heart disease-related causes.
If HbA1C jumped to 9.7 percent or higher, the risk of dying from any cause was 8.5 times higher for people with type 1 diabetes compared to people without the disease. And, the risk of death from a cardiovascular cause was nearly 10.5 times higher for people with diabetes, the researchers found.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.
from U.S. News - Health http://ift.tt/1uKJTqJ
No comments:
Post a Comment