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!