A new study found that a healthy blood glucose analysis result does not equate to lower risk to cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke. This finding contradicts an earlier study and may pave way for new diagnosis recommendations.
A 2005 study previously concluded that lowering the blood sugar levels could help in lowering the risk of heart disease. The tests focus on the Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c)--a hemoglobin that bond with glucose that determines if a person is already diabetic or not. The researchers recommended that blood glucose analysis should be done as part of the monitoring as elevated blood sugar level increases the risk of heart disease by 14 percent.
However, a new study contradicted this earlier finding. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, led by Dr. Emanuele di Angelantonio analyzed the data of 294,998 individuals who were not diagnosed with diabetes. During the 10-year follow-up period, seven percent of the participants suffered from cardiovascular events. This only means that if a person has a healthy blood sugar level, that doesn't save him from such incidents.
To check if their initial finding is correct, the researchers created a risk model factoring age, gender, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and smoking habits. However, they found that even if those factors are considered, nothing has changed much on the results.
"If you use conventional risk factors that are normally used in risk scores, things like age, sex, smoking status, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels, when you add the information on HbA1c, you really notice that it isn't adding too much," said Dr. Di Angelantonio to heartwire . "So the improvement, in addition to conventional risk factors, is very limited from a risk-prediction point of view."
This study was published in the March 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
