Insulin injections may be a double-edged sword for diabetic patients over 50 years of age, because of a recent study that appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine journal saying such medication may bring more harm than good.
Existing guidelines on type 2 diabetes mellitus suggest intensifying the treatment till the blood sugar levels of the patient reaches a particular goal. Findings from the study, however, indicate that insulin shots for such health condition have negative side effects that outdo the benefits one gets from it.
"For people with type 2 diabetes, the goal of managing blood sugar levels is to prevent associated diabetes complications, such as kidney, eye and heart disease, but it is essential to balance complication risks and treatment burdens when deciding how aggressively to treat blood sugars," Sandeep Vijan M.D., M.S., study’s lead author, says in a statement.
"If you're a patient with fairly low complication risks, but are experiencing symptoms from low blood sugar, gaining weight or find frequent insulin shots to be disruptive to your daily life, then the drugs are doing more harm than good,” adds Vijan, who is also an Internal Medicine professor at the U-M Medical School and a research scientist at the Center for Clinical Management Research at VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.
Vijan also emphasizes that prescribing medications is not only about the reduction of complication risks but also of helping these patients enhance the quality of their lives.
The study also recommends that the general benefit of a new medicine is less dependent on blood sugar but more on the safety, side effects and hassles of taking the new therapy.
For several diabetic patients, little benefit is added to an exhaustive blood sugar therapy when one achieves the moderate levels of glucose control, while the costs of treatments, risks and burdens largely increase, says Vijan.
The study also discovers that benefits of insulin injections wane with age. For patients aged 75 years old, the dangers of such treatments most likely overshadow any of the benefits.
The researchers say that individualized recommendations for treatments as determined by the possible risk of complications in patients are the better approach, instead of focusing on glucose issues alone.
The study titled Effect of Patients’ Risks and Preferences on Health Gains With Plasma Glucose Level Lowering in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus was conducted by VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, University College London and University of Michigan Health System. JAMA journal first published it online on June 30.
