Word: risks
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...Copenhagen in March, the EHR evolution was evidently still in progress, with the latest phase focusing on the roll out of telemedicine programs. In the past year, Denmark has piloted two home monitoring programs for patients with diabetes and patients on blood thinning medication - groups that are at high risk of expensive emergency hospitalization. For diabetics, specially trained nurses make home visits to patients with diabetic foot ulcers - which often become infected and lead to amputations. Over a secure video link, the doctor and nurse discuss the ulcers and decide a course of treatment. For patients on blood thinners...
Type 2 diabetes is growing fast in the U.S. - more than 23 million Americans have the disease and another 57 million are hovering dangerously close to developing it - and the diagnosis automatically puts patients at increased risk of other health problems, including heart disease, stroke, kidney problems and eye abnormalities...
...exactly how great that added risk is appears to be in question. The results of a large, multicenter trial raise the possibility that the danger of some diabetes complications may not be as great as earlier data has indicated and that doctors may be screening diabetes patients to no benefit. Reporting from a group of institutions in the U.S. and Canada, researchers involved in the Detection of Ischemia in Asymptomatic Diabetics (DIAD) study found that screening diabetes patients for heart risk fails to predict which patients are most likely to have a heart attack. DIAD also found that the risk...
...screening didn't appear to provide any health advantage, Wackers theorizes, may be that patients with diabetes (particularly the ones being monitored carefully in the study) are already benefiting from well controlled blood sugar - in patients, both with diabetes and without, high blood sugar is associated with increased heart risk. So, if diabetes patients are already being treated for potential heart risk factors before they become hazardous, screening becomes redundant...
...Wackers stresses, however, that these findings do nothing to diminish the very real risk of heart disease in diabetics. A 1998 Finnish study documented that diabetes patients who had not suffered a heart attack had the same poor health profile as those who had - findings that prompted the American Diabetes Association to recommend heart-disease screening for all diabetes patients with two or more additional risk factors for heart disease, such as high cholesterol or hypertension, even in the absence of symptoms. "That study really changed the field," says Wackers, "and told us we cannot miss the risk of heart...