New research sends a stark warning to overweight teens: If you develop diabetes, you'll have a very tough time controlling it.
A major study released Sunday tested several ways to manage blood sugar in teens newly diagnosed with diabetes and found that nearly half of the teens failed to control their blood sugar within a few years and that 1 in 5 suffered serious complications. The results spell trouble for a nation facing rising rates of "diabesity," Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity.
The federally funded study is the largest look at how to treat diabetes in teens. Earlier studies have focused mostly on adults, and most diabetes drugs aren't even approved for youths. The message is clear: Prevention is everything.
"Don't get diabetes in the first place," saidDr. PhilZeitler of the University of Colorado, one of the study leaders.
A third of American children and teens are overweight or obese. They are at higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, in which the body can't make enough insulin or can't use what it does make to process sugar from food. Until the rise of the obesity epidemic, doctors rarely saw children with Type 2 diabetes. The more common kind of diabetes in children is Type 1, which used to be called juvenile diabetes.
Doctors usually start Type 2 treatment with metformin, a pill to lower blood sugar. If it still can't be controlled, other drugs and daily insulin shots may be needed. The longer blood sugar runs rampant, the greater the risk of vision loss, nerve damage, kidney failure, limb amputation, even heart attacks and strokes.
The goal of the study was simple: What's the best way for teens to keep diabetes in check?
The study involved 699 overweight and obese teens recently diagnosed with diabetes. All had their blood sugar normalized with metformin, then received one of three treatments to try to maintain that control: metformin alone, metformin plus diet and exercise counseling, or metformin plus a second drug, Avandia.
After nearly four years, half in the metformin group were not able to maintain blood sugar control. The odds were a little better for the group that took the two drugs but not much different for those in the lifestyle group.
Even so, Zeitler said, doctors would not recommend the combination drug therapy because Avandia has been linked to higher risk of heart attacks in adults. Those risks became known after this study began.
Another study leader from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Dr. Mitchell Geffner, agreed that Avandia can't be recommended for teens, but said the study made clear they would need more than metformin to control their disease.
"A single pill or single approach is not going to get the job done," he said.
Among all the teens in the study, 1 in 5 had a serious complication such as very high blood sugar, usually landing them in the hospital.
The results were published online Sunday by the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a pediatric meeting in Boston. The National Institutes of Health funded the study and drug companies donated the medications.
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