The Day After: Experts Puzzled Over Increased Death Rate in ACCORD

They kill you. They don't know why. They don't know how.

Are you sure you want to take their fat person drugs and have their fat person surgery when either is useless, each is harmful and neither is necessary?

"Experts within and outside of the ACCORD trial are equally flummoxed by the finding that the group receiving intensive glucose lowering showed a higher mortality rate than those receiving standard care.

The announcement that the glucose-lowering part of the trial was being stopped because of this mortality difference was made yesterday by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the organization coordinating the study.

Chair of the ACCORD steering committee, Dr William Friedewald (Columbia University, New York), commented to heartwire: 'The simple and honest answer is that we have done extensive analyses and not identified a cause for the increased mortality. We will now do even more extensive analyses with all of our investigators, who are now unblinded to the results, and prepare a paper with the data and our best impressions of the possible causes.'"

This was a study of people with fat person diabetes - Type 2:

"In this trial of adults with type 2 diabetes at especially high risk for heart attack and stroke, the medical strategy to intensively lower blood glucose (sugar) below current recommendations increased the risk of death compared with a less-intensive standard treatment strategy."

Get fit. It is probably better than getting prematurely dead.

At least I think it is.