THE next step is to work out whether high blood pressure is a cause of diabetes or just a risk factor.
Advertisement
Although this link has been accepted before, the study involving more than four million people is expected to offer significant new understanding.
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?
It was the follow-up trial that revealed taking high blood pressure drugs at bedtime helped people reduce their risk of type 2 diabetes, mainly because they help reducing the sleeping person’s blood pressure during sleep time.
The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology today, looked at the health records of 4.1 million adults in the United Kingdom who were initially free of Type 2 diabetes.
“Confirming this connection reliably provides new hope for those people and new avenues for research”.
Systolic blood pressure is the top number in a blood pressure reading. So it wasn’t really clear whether blood pressure was or was not a respective for developing diabetes.
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.
“Our job is to provide research information to the larger scientific community and health professionals, so when you have a trial like this one that’s completed successfully, we feel we accomplished our mission”, he said.
Researchers cautioned that full analysis of the results had not been completed and that medical guidelines groups must still study the data to determine if it should lead to a change in practice.
It does actually present that relationship over time.
With the importance of keeping your blood pressure low once again being extolled by medical science, taking measures in your day-to-day life to ensure it stays low is extremely important.
Rahimi added, though, that further research needs to be done to prove a causal link, while there should also be additional investigations to assess if lowering blood pressure could prevent type 2 diabetes.
ANOUSHKA PATEL: That’s what we are fundamentally interested in.
There was also a 57pc decrease in the risk of developing new-onset type 2 diabetes in the bedtime-treated group after adjustment for the potential confounders that could skew the results.
Advertisement
“In particular researchers can now look at whether lowering blood pressure is an effective treatment or reduces the risk of getting diabetes”.
