Congratulations! We're Making Strides in Diabetes Care

Here's to Fewer Complications of Diabetes

Hi. I'm Dr. Anne Peters from the University of Southern California. Today I am going to congratulate all of us who for the past 20 years have been taking care of patients with diabetes, because the recent news is positive. We are doing a better job. I want to discuss 3 articles that address the care of patients with type 2 diabetes.

The study of which I am most proud was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.^[1] It is a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it looked at rates of 5 different complications of diabetes: myocardial infarction, stroke, lower-extremity amputation, end-stage renal disease, and death from a hyperglycemic crisis.

In the past 20 years, rates of all of those complications have significantly declined, with the highest reduction in the rates of myocardial infarction. Those rates fell by almost 68% -- which is a big reduction, much greater than we have seen in the nondiabetic population. Rates of all other complications have also declined, with the least decline seen in the rate of end-stage renal disease -- but even that declined by about 28%. With our focus on treating both micro- and macrovascular risk factors in our patients, we have made a difference in their health, and that makes me incredibly happy.