Williams Scholar Pens Op-Ed in New York Times on "When Diabetes Treatment Goes Too Far"
Kasia Lipska, who was a 2014 T. Franklin Williams/GEMSSTAR scholar, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times that questions conventional diabetes treatment for the elderly.
Kasia Lipska, who was a 2014 T. Franklin Williams/GEMSSTAR scholar, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times that questions conventional diabetes treatment for the elderly. For the roughly 11 million olde Americans afflicted with diabetes, a common rule of thumb from doctors advises patients "to get below seven," meaning those with diabetes should aim to have their blood sugar level below 7 percent. However, as Dr. Lipska write, there are serious problems with the below-seven pardigm, especially for older people.
"The health benefits of this strategy are uncertain for older people. Those early studies that were the rationale for going below seven were conducted in people with Type 1 diabetes or with younger patients with newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes. Subsequent trials of older patients raised doubts about the benefits," Dr. Lipska writes. "Worse, targeting low blood sugar levels can cause harm. In one instance, investigators actually had to stop a trial early because patients who were targeting hemoglobin A1C levels of six or below had significantly higher rates of death than patients targeting levels in the sevens."
Dr. Lipska's work in diabetes has been supported by the "Integrating Geriatrics into the Specialties of Internal Medicine: Moving Forward from Awareness to Action" grant.
To read the full op-ed piece, head over to the New York Times website.