A team of Spanish researchers concluded that taking your blood pressure medicine in time could help people prevent type 2 diabetes.
Advertisement
BRIDGET BRENNAN: And did you look at whether it’s high blood pressure that comes first or diabetes, or what’s the initial condition that people usually suffer from?
ANOUSHKA PATEL: We can’t say that it’s definitely caused by high blood pressure, the study design doesn’t allow us to make that conclusion.
“In hypertensive patients without diabetes, ingestion of the entire daily dose of one or more blood pressure-lowering medications at bedtime compared with ingestion of all such medications upon awakening results in significantly improved sleeping blood pressure control and prevention of new-onset diabetes”.
Taking blood pressure medications at bedtime, rather than in the morning, halves the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to new research.
THIS STUDY involved 2,012 adults (average age, 53) who had hypertension and were taking at least one medication to lower their blood pressure.
The result showed people were at nearly 60% higher risk of diabetes if they had high blood pressure. A certified health education specialist since 1989 and a professor of public health education at a state university for thirty years, she served as the department chair for more than a decade and taught courses in human disease, personal health, and health behavior theory, among many others.
But the jury is still out on whether diabetes is actually caused by high blood pressure.
“In particular researchers can now look at whether lowering blood pressure is an effective treatment or reduces the risk of getting diabetes”. So it wasn’t really clear whether blood pressure was or was not a respective for developing diabetes.
Doctors on a conference call to discuss the study said blood pressure of 120 over 80 was seen as desirable, but that 140/90 was a commonly used target. In addition, angiotensin contributes at increasing blood sugar and decreased insulin levels, which are the main factors of type 2 diabetes. People who took beta blockers or ACE inhibitors benefited the most, with 69 and 65 percent reductions in risk. During the second phase of the clinical trials, these were the medications that helped the participants to reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Advertisement
“Confirming this connection reliably provides new hope for those people and new avenues for research”.
