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Showing posts from June, 2017

Should a type 2 diabetic monitor blood sugars? Maybe not!

Today in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) I read that a group out of the University of North Carolina had actually done a randomized study of whether non-insulin treated type 2 diabetics (usually the adult onset ones) achieved better control of their blood sugars if they did a finger stick test of their blood glucose daily. It turns out that they do not. Blood sugars were not improved in a group of patients who monitored their blood sugars once daily compared to patients who did not monitor them at all. Also combining the blood sugar testing with an automatic message from the machine telling them how to interpret that blood sugar did not improve blood sugar control. Since 75% of patients with type 2 diabetes are estimated to check their blood sugar and there are over 29 million Americans with type 2 diabetes, and blood sugar monitoring is moderately expensive (though better than it used to be), not checking blood sugars could save billions of dollars a year.