BDO: Can You Control Diabetes?
Dr. James Gavin: What it really means to control diabetes, I think is a concept that’s changing. Because in the past, when we talked about controlling diabetes, we were really talking about one specific outcome. We were talking about making blood sugars normal.
The truth of the matter is the leading cause of death in people with diabetes; the reason my great-grandmother died prematurely; the reason my great uncle’s died prematurely is because of heart attacks and stroke and things like kidney failure.
Well, control of diabetes means that you control those things that lead to those outcomes. It means that, yes you control blood sugar but you also must make sure that you control blood pressure, that you reduce the likelihood that you’re gonna have abnormal clotting so people with diabetes should very often be on low dose or baby doses of aspirin and you control your body weight and you use these newer drugs that have been shown to reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular complications.
So there are a lot of things that are in the area of controlling diabetes that is now changing. We’re moving away from this uniform focus on reaching a blood sugar level, that’s just not enough, that’s not all there is to control this disease