Complications?

[Jelaca]

If you always have regular sugar levels, then are there any complications you could get by being diabetic? Or do you only get complications if you don't control your sugar levels?

 

[sugar2]

Not sure whether this is FAct or not, but my optician said that he has never come across any diabetic, who has been diabetic for a number of years, who doesn't have minor changes to the back of their eyes. His view was this was side effect of diabetes, but, if god control was kept, the only person who would ever be aware of it would be him, and you would not have any problems with it all.

This conversation did happen 15 years ago though...so whether thsi is still true, with better BG ccontrol I do not know.

 

[Snodger]

It's difficult to know because in the big trials they've done, it was very hard for anyone on insulin to have permanently normal levels. So they just don't know for sure. In the big DCCT trial they found that the intensive therapy group reduced their RISK of long term complications at an average HbA1c of 7.2%. But that doesn't mean none of these people had complications, just that fewer people had complications compared to the people with higher HbA1c.

Also not all complications are the same. Eg it seems that blood sugar levels are more important in reducing risk of retinopathy (eye damage) than they are for nephropathy (kidney damage). The risk of nephropathy doesn't really reduce once you've got to 8% HbA1c - you can aim for lower than that to improve your chances with eye complications, but your risk of kidney complications stays the same.

So in short, you could have pretty good bg levels and still, possibly, get complications. Life sucks. But the DCCT trial found that if you can get to 7.2% HbA1c it seems you can reduce your risk of retinopathy by 76%, kidney damage by 39%, and neuropathy by 60%.