It Doesn't Seem Logical But It Does Seem To Be So
If people with Type 2 diabetes are at a greatly increased risk of heart disease wouldn't it make sense to get their blood pressure and triglycerides down and their "good" cholesterol up? Quitting smoking and lowering "bad" cholesterol reduces the risk from very, very high to just very high so attacking these other presumed risk factors should help, right? Besides, pushing systolic blood pressure down closer to normal would obviously yield some benefits. And there's no way it could hurt. Right?
It turns out that these interventions, implemented on the basis of reasoning and not rigorous studies, either do no good, do no good and cause side effects, or do no good and increase the risk of heart attack by 50%. Be sure to read about the just published data and the reaction to it in an excellent write up by Gina Kolata in The New York Times.
How could this be? Well, what if the things everyone thinks are causes of heart disease in diabetics are really just other effects of the real cause? Or, and this is where it really gets scary, what if what everyone thinks is a cause in need of eradication is in fact part of the body's defense mechanism against the real cause? For a discussion about how obesity may be just such a protective mechanism see "One of the Scourges of Modern Life May Have Been Profoundly Misunderstood" in The Economist's Science and Technology section.
The takeaway from all this can be found in the first article. While these treatments seemed logical (and as noted in the article, at every meeting "some academic" would always be going on about how elevated blood sugar after a meal was dangerous and had to be lowered until eventually doctors had put thousands of people on these treatments) it turned out they were instead dangerous and ineffective. That'll always be the danger when we attempt to deduce solutions based on just the known variables of a complex and only partially understood system.
