January 8, 2018 – Diabetes Management

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Anchor lead: New guidelines have been released for the management of diabetes, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you have diabetes you will likely be hearing about new guidelines issued by the American Diabetes Association. Rita Kalyani, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins and chair of the committee that put together the guidelines, says a few changes are especially noteworthy.

Kalyani: We have added new recommendations suggesting that patients who have a history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, this includes a history of heart attack or stroke, that they may benefit from being on certain agents versus others.  Lifestyle modification and metformin therapy are the first agents that should be offered to a patient with type 2 diabetes. If a patient has a history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease we now have agents that have been proven to have cardiovascular benefit :30

Kalyani notes that there are now quite a number of medicines to manage diabetes that work by different mechanisms, some of which may be more suitable for some people than others, so when more than metformin and lifestyle are needed, an in depth talk with your physician is appropriate. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.