A diabetes specialist looked among medical literature for proof to support the use of glucose-lowering drugs for type 2 diabetes, but he couldn’t find any. Dr. Victor Montori, from the Mayo Clinic, questions in this article Glycemic Control for Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus wheter controlling blood sugars reduces the risk of complications.

Traditional Diabetes Knowledge Challenged

Dr. Montori says that the majority of experts in the field say that controlling blood sugar is associated with a lower risk of developing blindness, having a limb amputated or undergoing dialysis. “When we looked at the evidence for that”, Montori said, “we could not see any signal that would suggest that is true despite the question being asked at least since the 1970s.”

This finding reveals the plight in the knowledge of type 2 diabetes: the relationship between blood sugar and the disease is not completely understood.

“There is lots of debate and discussion as to what exactly is the causal relationship,” said Dr. Hertzel Gerstein, from McMaster University. “We know, for instance, that the higher the blood sugar the higher the risk of heart attacks, the higher the risk of cancer, the higher the risk of strokes, but whether other things related to the diabetes are causing those things is not known,” he added.

In other words, it is possible that there is a factor apart from blood sugar that is the culprit for long-term complications.

We need to know more

According to a research group at the University of British Columbia, this ambiguity requires a change in the way  type 2 diabetes drugs are approved.

All we know is that anti-diabetes drugs reduce blood sugar levels in the short-term. Blood sugar levels are distracting researchers from discovering and pursuing new leads.