Adopt Healthy Habits Early to Curb CVD Risk in Diabetes
Patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes who succeeded in improving their diet and becoming more physically active during the next year had a significantly lower risk of having a cardiovascular disease (CVD) event within 5 years, a new study suggests.
The research examined 4 lifestyle changes: increasing physical activity; decreasing or stopping alcohol consumption; upping both fiber and vitamin-C intake (as a marker of fruit and vegetable consumption); and reducing both calorie and total-fat intake.
Patients who were unable to improve any of these behaviors were 4 times more likely to have a cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke, or die from CVD during 5 years of follow-up, compared with their peers who made positive changes in at least 3 of the behaviors (P = .005). Becoming more physically active and drinking less alcohol had the biggest effects.
“I hope [this study] would motivate both patients and practitioners to focus on lifestyle change as an important element of diabetes management,” lead author Gráinne H. Long, PhD, from the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, United Kingdom, told Medscape Medical News.
Although “there’s a huge potential for lifestyle change to make a big difference…getting people to actually achieve and maintain that behavior change is the big problem,” she acknowledged. Future research should investigate how to best motivate patients to live a healthier lifestyle, she added.
The study, based on data from the ADDITION-Cambridge trial (BMC Public Health 2009;9:136), wa spublished online March 21, 2014 in Diabetes Care.
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