Diabetes News

This comes as no surprise to me, but children with type 1 diabetes who spent the most time glued to the TV had a tougher time controlling their blood sugar, according to a Norwegian study. Thanks to MSNBC and AP for alerting me to this important study.

The findings, the AP story notes, "lend support to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advice that children watch no more than two hours of TV daily," quoting lead author Dr. Hanna Margeirsdottir of the University of Oslo.

As many of us already know, snacking and overeating raise your blood sugar levels while exercising lowers them. Of course, it's important to note that watching TV requires no physical energy and often prompts kids to snack on junk food at the same time, especially when spurred on by tempting commercials.

The study's findings are quite intriguing, but now I'd really like to see a similiar study conducted on children with type 2 diabetes, which is hitting the younger set in increasing numbers, as I point out in my book SUGAR SHOCK!

The AP story quotes two important diabetes educators, one of whom is Monica Joyce, founder of a basketball camp for diabetic children where children are taught “they can get much better blood sugars if they’re active,” according to Joyce.

The second expert makes an important point regarding prevention, which is that if the the Univ. of Oslo researchers' theory is right, then simply turning off the TV could be added to the list of remedies “that are very low-cost to the health care system.” (This was according to Dr. Francine Kaufman, head of a diabetes program at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.)

Dr, Kaufman rightly insists: “This has got to be the social norm that it’s just not acceptable for kids to be baby-sat by TV.”

Coming soon: Speaking of TV-watching kids with diabetes, I'll soon take a look at the wonderful new book, Ending the Food Fight, from David Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D., one of America's foremost children's obesity experts. Dr. Ludwig is one of those health experts I was lucky enough to be able to interview for my book SUGAR SHOCK

Note from Connie: News, revelations and insights about the Avandia-could-lead-to-heart-attacks scare are pouring in at a fast and furious clip. So, given my demanding schedule this week, SUGAR SHOCK! Blog researcher/writer Jennifer Moore brings you this latest update about the drug that's supposed to help type 2 diabetics.

The FDA is looking worse by the day. Now comes news, as reported by Stephanie Saul and Gardiner Harris at The New York Times, Anna Wilde Matthews and Jeanne Whalen of the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters that John Buse, M.D., Ph.D., president-elect of the American Diabetes Association, wrote the FDA a letter in 2000, warning our watchdog governmental agency about the dangers Avandia may pose to people's hearts.

Dr. Buse, who is also chief of endocrinology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote that there was “a worrisome trend in cardiovascular deaths and severe adverse events” amongst patients taking Avandia. Dr. Buse also slammed GlaxoSmithKline, the Big Pharma maker and seller of the popular drug, for what he called its "pervasive and systemic efforts" to downplay Avandia's risks and overstate its upside, according to the New York Times.

This comes after news, which Connie posted about earlier on this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog, that Dr. Steven Nissen, the physician who first warned us of the dangers of the now withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, led a team of researchers to sound the alarms about Avandia in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, which spurred the FDA to issue a safety alert of this very popular medication.

One wonders why the FDA didn't speak up much sooner since they had ample evidence that Avandia could be dangerous to people who are already vulnerable to heart disease because of their diabetes.

Even GlaxoSmithKline told the FDA that Avandia raised the risk of heart attacks in its patients by 30%, according to Brain Wingfield of Forbes.com. Glaxo SmithKline's findings, which was revealed to the FDA back in 2005 and again in 2006, are very similar to those of Dr. Nissen and his team, who said that a type 2 diabetic would have a 28.9% chance of having a heart attack within 7 years of taking Avandia, according to the New York Times.

What's more, Stephanie Saul and Gardiner Harris of the Times reports, the FDA reprimanded GlaxoSmithKline for downplaying concerns about the drug's safety in 2001, a year after Dr. Buse wrote his rather troubling letter.

Predictably, Glaxo SmithKline issued a statement vigorously disputing Dr. Buse's analysis, calling it "unbalanced and unsubstantiated." That's a patently absurd position to take, given that Glaxo SmithKline itself admitted that the drug substantially raised heart attack risk. The pharmaceutical company can't have it both ways here.

To be fair, the Wall Street Journal makes the startling observation that Dr. Buse was a consultant for two companies marketing diabetes drugs competing with Avandia at the time he sent his warning to the FDA. And Dr. Buse has said that the FDA should wait for more data before taking any further on Avandia (though, tellingly, he doesn't recommend the drug to his own patients, The Times says).

But since Glaxo SmithKline itself revealed the drug's potential problems, and a second prominent, credible doctor did too, my inclination is to think Dr. Buse's position has a lot of merit. Glaxo SmithKline, on the other hand, is talking out of both sides of its mouth and has a vested interest--to the tune of $3 billion-a-year in sales, says the New York Times--in peddling the notion that Avandia's risks are overstated.

So while I find Glaxo SmithKline's behavior irresponsible, I'll save the bulk of my ire for the FDA, whose job first and foremost is to protect the public. Apparently, though, according to a very informative piece by Marilynn Marchione of the AP, which The Washington Post ran, the FDA doesn't always discover the risks of drugs it allows to hit the market.

In the case of Avandia, Marchione writes, the FDA didn't require Glaxo to show that Avandia had a clear clinical benefit to diabetic patients, like fewer hospitalizations or fewer serious problems with blood sugar, but was instead approved because it showed short-term improvements in certain blood sugar measurements. She writes that Avandia's dangers weren't clear until Dr. Nissen's team gathered all the pertinent data on the 28,000 subjects Glaxo SmithKline itself used in 42 experiments involving the drug.

Excuse me? Isn't it the FDA's job to make sure to get all the critical information about a drug in place before deciding that it can be sold to a trusting public? Shouldn't someone at the FDA have done what Dr. Nissen's team did, if not before approving Avandia for sale, certainly soon thereafter? Isn't that what our tax dollars go to the FDA to do?

Now, because of its apparent lapse, the FDA will have to answer to us and Congress in hearings on June 6. Additionally, Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Charles Grassley of Iowa have written the FDA demanding that the agency tell us what they knew about Avandia and when they knew it, and why they reacted in a "leisurely" fashion to Glaxo SmithKline's revelations about Avandia's cardiovascular risks, Forbes.com says.

The Forbes.com article also notes that the senators wrote a letter to Glaxo SmithKline, claiming that they've heard that the pharmaceutical giant silenced at least one employee who wanted to speak out about Avandia's cardiovascular risks. (Horrendous, if true.)

I can only hope that Avandia didn't cause a heart attack in any of the 6 million Americans who have taken the drug. What an appalling job by the FDA.

From Jennifer Moore for the SUGAR SHOCK! Blog

Note again from Connie: Thanks, Jennifer, for updating us. Folks, while you're learning about this scary drug disaster, make sure to read my follow-up press release, which quotes Dr. Stephen Sinatra (contributing author for SUGAR SHOCK!) pointing out that if you have type 2 diabetes or are at risk for the disease, you may not even need drugs after all. Kicking sugar, exercising, etc. may be the best treatment.

Oh no! Another nightmarish consequence of taking drugs!

The safety of Avandiaâ„¢ -- often prescribed to type 2 diabetics -- has been called into question by an eye-opening, scathing scientific article in today's New England Journal of Medicine. which finds, from reviewing 42 clinical trials, that the popular drug may raise the risk of heart attacks by 43 % and cardiovascular death by a whopping 64%.

The lead author of the original article is the respected Steven Nissen, M.D., chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, and immediate past president of the prestigious American College of Cardiology. (Read his bio here.)

Avandia -- also known as rosiglitazone -- is widely used to help type 2 diabetics lower their blood glucose levels, and it is a $3 billion-a-year business now at risk of being drastically curtailed.

"Unfortunately, rosiglitazone appears to increase, rather than decrease, the most serious complication of diabetes, heart disease," said Dr. Nissen in a press release from the Cleveland Clinic.

Every news outlet was full of different takes on these scary conclusions.

• Stephanie Saul of the New York Times weighed in with an enlightening piece, in which she noted that Dr. Nissen was "one of the first doctors to raise questions about the cardiovascular safety of Vioxx, the Merck painkiller that was withdrawn from the market in 2004. His concerns about Avandia were first publicly raised last December in a letter in the Lancet."
• Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters pointed out that a congressional committee has already scheduled a hearing on the drug's safety. "Both the drug company and the FDA have some major explaining to do about what they knew about Avandia, when they knew it, and why they didn't take immediate action to protect patients," the reporter quotes Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee.
• Meanwhile, Marilynn Marchione of AP noted that although FDA officials issued a safety alert Monday, they "planned no immediate changes to the current side effect warnings on the drug's packaging." She reports that Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced a hearing for June 6 on the FDA's role. She writes: And on the Senate floor, Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, "criticized the agency for not acting more swiftly. "Do we have another Vioxx on our hands with Avandia? I am not sure, but I intend to find out," he said.
• Then, Seve Sternberg of USA Today talked about how nine months ago risks had been raised about the drug in an article with the alarming, but appropriate headline, "Diabetes drug called potential death risk."
• Meanwhile, TIME magazine's Jyoti Thottam offered a compelling overview of the scare and raised some pressing questions in an article entitled, "Is Avandia the next Vioxx?" She points out that Dr. Nissen told TIME that he began looking into Avandia because he was concerned by data from two of the largest studies of diabetic patients taking the drug. "The cardiovascular events were all going the wrong direction," he told the reporter. She writes: "Though the results weren't statistically significant, they pushed him to look at other data sets, including studies by the FDA and from the clinical-trials registry on GlaxoSmithKline's website. Nissen had gathered his data by April 24, and six days later submitted the paper to the Journal's editors."

You now can check out the FDA and drug-maker's responses.

• Here's the safety alert that the FDA rushed to issue.
• And now you can read GlaxoSmithKline's response to the NEJM's article.

More tomorrow on this new Avandia scare.

Coming up: Why don't we hear more about research and success stories, which definitely show that reducing or cutting out high-glycemic carbs (sugar and processed grains) and exercising may be the most effective ways to manage type 2 diabetes?

Fasinating findings were just released by German researchers, who found that fiber intake from grain, but not from fruit or vegetables, may help prevent diabetes.

Huh? Veggies and fruits don't cut back on diabetes risk? This sure contradicts results from other studies.

Anyhow, thanks to MedPage.com for alerting me to this study, which found that there's:

Learn more about this landmark study at MedPage.com.

But before you go boost your intake of grains, even if they're whole grains, you should learn about the dangers of grains here at Mercola.com. You also can read Dr. Loren Cordain's paper, "Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword."

Researchers from the New York University School of Medicine have found a shocking 200% increase in hospitalizations for children afflicted with type 2 diabetes, Health Day reporter Steven Reinberg writes.

Let me repeat this horrifying news: There's a 200% increase in hospital admissions because kids have type 2 diabetes.

NYU's research team, led by Dr. Rhonda Graves, examined nationwide hospital discharge records from the years 1997, 2000 and 2003. They found that the rate of increase in hospitalizations of kids with type 2 diabetes dramatically outpaced that of children with type 1 diabetes by- 200% to 15%, Reinberg reports.

Dr. Graves and her team were slated to present their findings at the yearly meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Toronto.

Sadly, childhood obesity is the culprit, as children who suffer from type 2 diabetes are typically overweight.

Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center, says of pediatric type 2 diabetes "a generation ago, this condition did not exist."

"Epidemic childhood obesity has transformed a chronic disease of mid-life into a pediatric scourge," adds Dr. Katz, who wasn't involved with this study. (FYI, Connie interviewed Dr. Katz for her book SUGAR SHOCK!)

If this country needs a wake-up call about how serious a problem childhood obesity is, this study is it.

This study and Reinberg's article make it pretty plain: Childhood obesity is a major culprit in diabetes, and diabetes can cause devastating complications, even in kids.

"I personally know of a 17-year-old boy," Dr. Katz notes, "with early onset obesity and type 2 diabetes, who has already had a triple coronary bypass. If current trends persist, cases like his could become the rule rather than the rare and terrible exception."

This simply has to stop. Connie's book SUGAR SHOCK! presents some compelling reasons for the childhood obesity epidemic (See Chapter 6), including ever-increasing portion sizes, over-indulgence in quickie carbs, and too much sugar, of course. Her book also delves into how that Big Food works to undermine our health efforts by specifically marketing their products to impressionable kids.

But, as challenging as childhood obesity is, we adults have to fight back harder. No one likes to think of legions of sick kids lying in hospital beds, but Dr. Katz warns that could easily happen if we don't act to stop the childhood obesity crisis in its tracks now.

As this blog recently reported, high profile folks like Bill Clinton and Rachael Ray are jumping on the anti-obesity bandwagon. Perhaps this NYU study and Reinberg's alarming story will help to get more people on board as well.

From Jennifer Moore for the SUGAR SHOCK! Blog

Simply banning sugary foods and drinks and encouraging kids to replace junk with healthy, fiber-rich foods, decreased the rate of childhood obesity, according to an important new Swedish study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet, whose press release about this research appears on Medical News Today.

This study, called the Stockholm Obesity Prevention Project (STOPP), involved children ages 6 through 10 at 10 schools in the Stockholm area. Half the schools removed sweets and sugary beverages from their premises, offering kids higher-quality fare instead. The other half of schools didn't take out the sweet stuff and let the kids continue to indulge in them.

The results were amazing but expected:

• The rate of overweight kids at the schools that just said no to sugar-filled food dropped from 22% to 16%.
• The youngsters allowed to continue eating sugary foods saw their rates of obese and overweight kids rise from 18% to 21%.

(In fact, in Sweden as a whole, the rates of childhood obesity have been climbing, just as they have in the U.S., according to another study reported on by Nicholas Bakalar of the New York Times.)

This study is really good news, because it's proof positive that we can do something about childhood obesity. And thankfully, more and more American schools are getting the message and kicking more and more sugar to the curb.

I hope parents whose kids attend schools that still ply them with needless sugar will use this study to spur their children's schools to change.

But parents need to act on the home front, too. Yes, as a mother, I understand that it's challenging to get your little ones to give up sweet stuff they love. But it's not impossible. In fact, Connie offers great advice on what parents can do to get their kids away from sugar in her book SUGAR SHOCK! (The tips -- provided by a number of experts -- are in Chapter 17, to be exact).

Let's hope news of this study spreads quickly to responsible adults and that they'll take action to fight this very serious problem for our kids.

From Jennifer Moore

Note from Connie: Wow! This is fabulous! I've been eagerly awaiting for this results of this study to be released, and sure enough, the findings are quite impressive. Also, please note that STOPP was financed by the Stockholm County Council, with contributions from the Swedish Research Council and the Masonic Home for Children in Stockholm. Maybe some American organizations will get the same idea to do such a study?

Lately, the news keeps coming in connecting genes and type 2 diabetes.

Today, as MSNBC reports, thanks to the Associated Press, a new study -- one of the largest yet -- reveals that scientists studying more than 32,000 people in five countries found clusters of new gene variants that raise the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The study, which was published online in the journal Science, reveals some fascinating findings about spots that harbor genetic risk factors for this complicated killer.

And the researchers were pretty excited about what they've uncovered. “We have been.. looking under the lamppost to try to find those genes ... and lots of times the lamplight was not actually where we wanted it,” said Dr. Francis Collins, genetics chief at the National Institutes of Health, a co-author of the research. But this new approach, he says, “allows us to light up the whole street, and look what we find.”

Meanwhile, as mentioned in a recent Newsweek article, a simple blood test may soon be used to identify individuals whose genes put them at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The biotechnology company deCODE Genetics discovered a number of genes linked to the disease, including one that regulates the amount of insulin produced in the body. People with an abnormal copy of the gene are at a much greater risk of developing diabetes.

This new test -- which could help spur people to action (such as exercising more, losing weight and taking drugs) -- is expected to cost $500, Bloomberg.com reports.

But, think about it, wouldn't identifying a person's genetic predisposition for type 2 diabetes be problematic or maybe even dangerous? What happens if, after taking the test, a person finds out that he or she is nott likely to develop type 2 diabetes? Would that person use that information as license to exercise less and eat those potentially dangerous, fast-acting carbs? Those are thoughts to ponder.

Besides, "Just because you don't have the gene, that doesn't mean you have zero risk," Larry Deeb, president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, told Newsweek.

"So we don't want to be telling people that if they test negative, they can just sit on the couch and not worry. They're still not off scot-free."

Which brings us back to the same message I raise here over and over again. Genetic susceptibility or not, you still need to take care of yourself. Cut out or cut back on those culprit carbs, exercise regularly and try to relax. All of those activities can give you a more happy, healthy life.

Althea Chang contributed to this post.