Great strides have been made in the field of cardiology in recent years. However, according to a new study just out, people with diabetes remain dangerously at risk for heart-related problems like angina and heart attack. The results of the study have been published In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (August 2007).

It's quite disturbing to read the numbers on this. Example? For every hundred diabetics who experience severe heart attack, just over eight will die within thirty days. For non-diabetics, that number goes down to around five. I could go on, but you get the picture.

The solution? Says the author of the study, Dr. Elliott M. Antman: "We need aggressive strategies to manage the diabetic population. What we need to do is everything to halt the epidemic of diabetes and find through research what therapies are most helpful for diabetic patients. We've got to do better for those patients." Hear, hear.

But what should those "aggressive strategies" be? And how do you implement them? That's the sticking point. The Washington Post caught the American Diabetes Association's Larry Deeb in a moment of remarkable frankness, saying he really doesn't know what can be done to get cardiologists and endocrinologists working together on this. C'mon, Larry. That's not exactly encouraging news for all the people out there with diabetes!

A major study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is just out. It found that those treated with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) - brand name: Plaquenil - an antimalarial drug also prescribed for RA, are much less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. The study was conducted over a period of more than twenty years and analyzed the treatment of 4,905 adult patients with RA. Bottom line: relative risk for T2 diabetes declined by up to seventy-seven percent in patients who took HCQ for four years. Wow.

But that's not all. The researchers also say the RA patient who did develop diabetes were less likely to need medications for blood sugar control. Moreover, according to Mary Chester M. Wasko, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the greatest potential application could come in using HCQ as a preventive for people with pre-diabetic symptoms, "much in the same way as a daily baby aspirin is suggested for people at high risk for heart disease."

This is significant because having RA is a condition that usually leads to reduced activity levels and also to weight gain (as a consequence of taking corticosteroids), and these two factors put them at risk for Type 2 diabetes. So this is good news indeed.

The study was directed by scientists at Stanford University, however, researchers from multiple institutions were involved. Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health. The report has been published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Click here or here to read more.

Diabetes drugs Byetta and Januvia have been declared safe and effective...for now...by researchers from Boston's Tufts-New England Medical Center. Both medications effectively reduce blood sugar by around one percent or less. This compares with older drugs like metformin, which can cause a drop of as much as two percent. On the other hand, the newer drugs are popular (and this has received tons of publicity over the last year or two) because they don't routinely cause weight gain like the older drugs and, in fact, they can even promote weight loss.

The Tufts announcement came with a caveat, however: these drugs have not been around long. This means their long-term safety is not known. As far as side effects go, one author of the study, Anastassios Pittas, told USA Today that although they didn't see anything really scary, "I would be more comfortable seeing two-and three-year data before embracing them." Pittas also acknowledges the (exorbitant) cost of Byetta and Januvia is a problem.

No new research was done to arrive at this conclusion. Rather, the researchers assessed the findings of twenty-nine previous studies. Their report has been published in the latest issue of medical-world heavyweight Journal of the American Medical Association.

The timing of this news is indeed fortunate for drug giants Merck & Co., which owns Januvia, and Amylin & Lilly, which owns Byetta. They must be very worried indeed about shaken consumer confidence following the Avandia mess, which has received a lot of publicity of late - bad, very bad, publicity that tarnished the public image of Big Pharma. And it's public image was already down about level with lawyers. (Apologies to all the lawyers out there...)

Just released in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study involved 2,435 young people under 20 newly diagnosed with diabetes in 2002 and 2003. This effort claims to be unique as it is the first study designed to estimate our nation's incidence of diabetes across race, ethnicity and diabetes type in this younger population.

Estimated rates of type 1 diabetes over previous estimates are up 40-60 percent for white children and 20-40 percent for black and Hispanic children. But the study also cautions direct comparisons can't be made as earlier studies incorporated varying methodologies.

The study states overall diabetes incidence in children and adolescents is 24.3 cases per 100,000 annually. Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are most common in whites (26.1 per 100k), blacks (25.4) and American Indian (25.0) youth, and lowest in Hispanic (20.2) and Asian/Pacific Islander (16.7) youth.

Type 2 rates were pretty low, only 19 cases in 5-9 year-olds, 215 in 10-14 year-olds and 296 in 15-19 year-olds. No kids under 5 had type 2, thank goodness. In the teens aged 15-19, type 1 was most common in whites. Conversely, it was least common in American Indians, however for type 2, reverse those statistics. Dana Debelea of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center stated for older kids the diabetes picture is complex. African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders and Hispanics have almost half and half of type 1 and type 2.

Catherine DeAngelis, editor of JAMA, stated a newly diagnosed adult has 20 to 30 years of suffering ahead, while a child with diabetes faces 50 to 60 years of the same. I hadn't seen this sobering statistic before -- each year 15,000 children and teens are diagnosed with type 1, and 3,700 diagnosed with type 2.

Okay, so this latest news is less than surprising, that much I'll admit: a national survey carried out for Indiana University has found that adults in the US have become increasingly overweight and obese. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed in 2005 were overweight or obese, compared with fifty-eight percent surveyed in a national study back in 2001. The stats show that even when figures are adjusted for socio-economic factors, obese people are still twenty-six percent more likely - and severely obese people fifty percent more likely - to have a serious health condition like diabetes.

Sigh. No, not a big surprise. But, still, we have to keep on top of our statistics if we want to tackle the problem, right? Anyway, the results of the study have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (August 2006). Among the observations of the study's authors is the fact that the statistics disprove the notion that weight gain in American has reached a plateau. In fact, people keep packing on the pounds, confirming the worst fears of health professionals - that the incidence of obesity-related health problems like diabetes will continue to climb. The authors also conclude that efforts to educate the public about the dangers of excess weight are not having the hoped-for effect.

Well, now. Here's some news that will shock many Americans. White, middle-aged English people enjoy better health than their American counterparts. Yes, despite all those stereotypes about unhappy Brits enduring dreary weather and soggy steak and kidney pies, it seems the English have the edge. Most notably, the British have lower rates of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Reasons for the disparity are being bandied about and include the fact that Americans are comparatively overworked (and, thus, more stressed out), as well as the fact that because Americans (outside of Manhattan) drive absolutely everywhere they just don't get enough walking each day. The results, which have just been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are being compared to the similarly shocking statistics showing that the French, despite a pretty fatty national diet, also enjoy better health (and less obesity) than the Americans. Talk about getting the last laugh.

The head of the Johns Hopkins Diabetes Center has urged physicians to make better use of available blood-testing tools. "The message is, we have tools that are very accurate, but they don't work at all if they are not used properly," said Christopher Saudek, a former president of the American Diabetes Association. Saudek is the lead author of a study, the results of which have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that indicates diabetes can be controlled quite successfully when patients and physicians communicate regularly and effectively and when blood tests are carried out at appropriately regular intervals and taken carefully to ensure accuracy at all times.