Lowering Blood Sugar Helps to Prevent Heart Disease

• Diabetes in now believed to play a role in cardiovascular problems. Lowering your blood sugar may prevent heart disease
• Actions leading to high blood sugar also lead to an increased risk of heart disease. These are obesity, inactivity and high LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels

Diabetes has long been considered one of the most serious diseases because of its chronic nature. One you develop the condition there is no cure only life-long management. Unfortunately, diabetes is now believed to play a role in cardiovascular problems. The good news is that lowering blood sugar is thought to now help prevent heart disease.

Understanding How Diabetes Causes Damage

Physicians have long known that diabetes causes damage to parts of the body. The problem is most of us don’t know exactly why this is this case. Understanding can help us realize the importance of lowering blood sugar and maintaining correct levels over the long-term if we want to prevent damaging our bodies, including our hearts.

What happens is people who have diabetes can not produce significant amounts of insulin to control the amount of sugar in their blood. With that extra sugar floating around in the bloodstream, problems are going to arise. The sugar ends up interacting with and altering the proteins found in the blood vessels. This changes them and makes them less effective in doing their job.

In the eyes, for example, too much sugar can cause those blood vessels to be blocked and that can lead to the development of less strong vessels and vision problems. These end up leaking blood into the eyes and damaging the retina. Eventually, diabetic patients can go blind as a result. Similar problems can happen in the circulatory system and lead to damage to important arteries and vessels serving the heart.

Additionally, the lifestyle situations that contribute to diabetes and to high blood sugar are the antithesis of efforts to prevent heart disease. This means that the actions leading to high blood sugar can also lead to an increased risk of heart disease, such as obesity, inactivity, and high LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

Obviously, if you change some of these lifestyle issues and end up lowering your blood sugar levels you are also going to succeed in helping to prevent heart disease as well.

Other Reasons to Worry about Blood Sugar

Two studies have given people who have trouble lowering blood sugar more reasons to try. A 2002 study of five years worth of medical records including more than 650 patients found that high levels of blood sugar were correlated to increase mortality risks for patients who had a stroke. Not only did 40% of the patients have elevated blood sugar levels upon arriving at the hospital those who had not been effective at lower blood sugar ended up staying in the hospital longer and in dying at higher rates than the other stroke patients.

In 2005, a second study was published. This study showed high blood sugar levels could make recovering after a heart attack more challenging. Between 2001 and 2004, more than 730 patients were involved in the study. All of the patients had been admitted to the hospital because of a heart attack. During the study, 65 of the patients died and 56 of those patients left the hospital with higher than normal blood sugar levels. Although more studies are needed, the study suggests a connection may exist between not lowering blood sugar and reducing your survival from heart disease complications.

The information supplied in this article is not to be considered as medical advice and is for educational purposes only.