This result shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. For years, I have noted that people diagnosed with maturity-onset (Type II) diabetes see their health continue to decline despite medical treatment with drugs. If they live long enough, their dosages of diabetic meds eventually have to be increased, or different meds have to be given, and eventually many have to resort to insulin. In those same people, the same is true for their hypertension and high cholesterol meds. In other words, despite taking meds that normalize their blood sugar levels, blood pressure levels, and blood lipids, they continue to get sicker. The obvious implication of that is that the underlying problem that caused the high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and/or hypertension to begin with, has not been treated.
Most of the patients in this study probably were treated with insulin, or the classes of drugs that stimulate the body to make more insulin. Therein lies the problem. Treating Type II diabetes with insulin or insulin-producing drugs is like throwing gas on a fire to put it out, and more importantly, the underlying problem goes unaddressed.
The article discussing this study backs this up. Note the following from the article:
“Dr. John Buse, the vice-chairman of the study’s steering committee and the president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association, described what was required to get blood sugar levels low, as measured by a protein, hemoglobin A1C, which was supposed to be at 6 percent or less. ...Many were taking four or five shots of insulin a day,” he said. “Some were using insulin pumps. Some were monitoring their blood sugar seven or eight times a day. .. .They also took pills to lower their blood sugar, in addition to the pills they took for other medical conditions and to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol. ...Those assigned to the less stringent blood sugar control, an A1C level of 7.0 to 7.9 percent, had an easier time of it. They measured their blood sugar once or twice a day, went to the clinic every four months and took fewer drugs or lower doses.”
DUH. .. . It’s almost comic that the writer then states: “So it was quite a surprise when the patients who had worked so hard to get their blood sugar low had a significantly higher death rate, the study investigators said.”
Someone should clue these researchers in on the fact that Type II diabetes is not caused by insufficient insulin in the blood. In fact, Type II diabetics pump out EXCESS insulin in a futile effort to increase cell uptake of the stuff because of resistance at the cell wall. Giving Type II patients insulin, Glucophage, Tolinase, etc. is the gasoline added to the fire.
I understand why insulin and tolinase(stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin) would be bad. But how does glucophage contribute to the problem? I thought glucophage was supposed to reduce insulin resistance.