medwireNews: A drive to improve the care of screen-detected diabetes patients in primary care appears to also result in better outcomes for high-risk patients without diabetes.
A total of 11,224 patients in the ADDITION-Denmark study were normoglycemic, despite screening as high-risk for diabetes. But these patients belonged to primary practices that had been randomly assigned to receive training and support to deliver intensive, comprehensive diabetes treatment and education to their patients.
Compared with 10,289 patients in practices that continued to deliver routine care to their diabetes patients, those in the intensive-care practices had a significant 8% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk during the 10 years of the study. The effect was most pronounced among patients at high cardiovascular risk, at a 15% reduction in risk.
However, Rebecca Simmons (University of Cambridge, UK) and co-researchers note that patients were generally undertreated, even the high-risk group. “We suggest that the reduction in cardiovascular events might have been greater if general practitioners were convinced to treat according to guidelines for cardiovascular risk management,” they write in Diabetologia.
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Read the full research paper here.