Key Points in the ADA's New Diabetes Guidelines

New ADA Standards of Care: A Gradual Evolution

Hi. I am Dr. Anne Peters, and today I am going to talk about the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 2014 Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes.^[1] These standards of care aren't dramatically different from previous standards of care. These standards are the result of a gradual evolution of knowledge that we have gained from year to year. It is important to review the key points each year and talk about what is different.

Another important point about these standards is that increasingly standards from different organizations are different with respect to patient management. For example, the American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines for the treatment of a lipid disorder in a patient with diabetes is now somewhat different from the ADA guidelines. Guidelines for the treatment of hypertension are increasingly different. Screening for something as basic as gestational diabetes has 2 different approaches.

Still Individualizing After All These Years

We need to reconcile, within ourselves, the knowledge from the different guidelines and how they fit for each of our patients, and then come up with individualized care for each patient, which is a key theme of these guidelines.

As a practitioner, I bristle at the suggestion that perhaps I haven't been individualizing care for my patients all of these years, but I realize that it is important for everyone -- from patients to providers to the insurers and to the people who are measuring our outcomes -- to recognize how important it is to assess each patient and his or her situation and needs, to determine what is best for that patient and to proceed from there.

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Cite this: Key Points in the ADA's New Diabetes Guidelines - Medscape - Jan 21, 2014.