Type 2 Diabetics should have cholesterol lowering drugs say doctors

Main Category: Cholesterol
Article Date: 20 Apr 2004 - 0:00 PST

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Doctors are saying that the majority of Type 2 diabetics in the USA should be placed on cholesterol lowering drugs.

The ACP's (American College of Physicians) new guidelines advises that almost all diabetic patients who have heart disease or hypertension, a high cholesterol count, are obese or smoke, should be on cholesterol lowering drugs (Crestor, Lipitor, Pravachol, Zocor).
Dr. Vencenza Snow of the ACP said "Patients with diabetes should realize that controlling their blood sugar is important, but it's not the only aspect of diabetes care that's important. Their blood pressure and their lipid control is also very important and can have a significant impact on their mortality and on their getting sick."

Top doctors say that about 60% of patients with Type 2 diabetes will die of heart attack or stroke.

You can read the new guidelines in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Snow said "The surprising result of those studies was that even if you had near-normal cholesterol to start with, and took a statin drug to lower it even more, you still got benefits. That tells you that it's not just lowering the cholesterol that's good -- it's being on that statin, too. Something else is going on."

The guidelines advise that all patients with Type 2 diabetes (and heart disease) should be on statins, even if their cholesterol levels are not high.

They also advise doctors to have diabetic patients on statins even if they do not have any heart disease but have any of the following characteristics:

-- The patient is obese

-- The patient is physically inactive

-- The patient smokes or has a history of smoking

-- The patient has high blood pressure

-- The patient has a high cholesterol level

The ACP says that when cholesterol levels have come back to normal the patients should still be on low doses of statins.

Dr. Snow, when commenting on diabetic type 2 patients who did not need to have statins said "Those are the younger diabetics who don't have high cholesterol, who don't smoke or have hypertension." She went on to say that the numbers of patients in this category is very small.

A while ago the American Diabetes Association came to the same conclusion and gave the same advice.

Dr. Snow, when commenting on diet and exercise said that they "can help decrease cholesterol for some, but there's a strong genetic component as well. That's where we need the drug therapy."

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