One Pill At a Time

By Jan Chait Which is a better way of treating people with Type 2 diabetes: Starting with one medicine and adding more, or starting with multiple medicines and lowering doses or subtracting meds? I'm a proponent of beginning with multiple medicines that target different areas, getting the blood glucose down, then lowering doses and/or subtracting medicines. I blogged about this in 2008, but had previously written about it in 2004, based on an interview with California-based endocrinologist Allen B. King, who calls the method "Blast and Taper Fast." King explained that it takes more medicine to bring a high blood glucose level down than it does to maintain a normal level. Depending on the person's fasting blood glucose after undergoing a two- to six-week period of increased activity and eating changes, he hits them with up to three different medicines. And if their glucose isn't down to normal levels in two weeks, they're on insulin. Wow! Your glucose is coming down. In fact, you're doing so well the doctor is taking medicines away or, at least, lowering the doses. Now let's go to the United Kingdom, where researchers looked at the records of 81,573 people with Type 2 diabetes. Records were in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink. Findings were published online in Diabetes Care on July 26. You can read an article about it here. If you have a subscription to Diabetes Care, you can read the original. Those who had an HbA1c of 7% at baseline had to wait a median of 2.9 year...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs