Can Coffee Help?

High Blood Sugar Levels Add To Heart and Stroke Deaths

Scientists in the United States and New Zealand have calculated that in addition to the 960,000 diabetes deaths worldwide each year, increased blood sugar levels are linked to 1.5 million deaths from heart disease and 700,000 from strokes.

"A lot of people are dying as a result of their blood glucose being elevated even though many have blood glucose levels below the clinical threshold of what is diagnosed as diabetes," Dr. Majid Ezzati, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, said in an interview.

Blood sugar level is the amount of glucose in the blood. People with higher than optimum levels fall below the limit of being diagnosed as diabetic but can still suffer damage to blood vessels and have an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

Ezzati and his team analyzed the impact of higher than optimum glucose levels on deaths in 2001 from heart disease and strokes. They gathered data from 52 countries around the world. Their findings, published in The Lancet Medical Journal, put the total mortality figure from high blood sugar at 3.1 million. It is more than the 2.4 million deaths attributed to being overweight or obese but less than the 4.8 million caused by smoking and 3.9 million by high cholesterol, according to the researchers.

"Our research demonstrated that people who are at a pre-diabetic level have blood glucose levels that from a cardiovascular perspective have some associated risk, said Ezzati. "These small risks accumulate and cause a lot of deaths even though they don't fall into any clinical classification," he added.

Coffee Reduces Risk of Type II Diabetes

New York (Reuters Health) - Coffee drinkers have a substantially lower risk of developing Type II Diabetes than people who abstain from the beverage, a new study shows.

This "striking" protective effect was seen in former coffee drinkers as well, Besa Smith and co-investigators at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla report. "The growing body of literature definitely suggests strongly that there is something there," she told Reuters Health in an interview. Just what that something is isn't clear, but it's probably not caffeine, she said, because the effect has also been observed with decaffeinated coffee. Smith and her colleagues investigated 910 men and women, all of whom were 50 or older and free of diabetes when the study began. When the subjects were followed-up about 8 years later, the former and current coffee drinkers were about 60 percent less likely to have developed Type II Diabetes.

Coffee's protective effect was seen even among people who had impaired glucose tolerance, an early warning sign of diabetes, at the beginning of the study. The researchers were unable to determine how much coffee people needed to drink to produce the protective effect. "But study participants were in general, not heavy coffee drinkers" Smith said.

"Given the increasing prevalence of obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, and diabetes, and the fact that the majority of adults in most of the Westernized world drink coffee on a daily basis, a coffee benefit could have widespread impact," she and her colleagues conclude. Further investigation is warranted.

Diabetes is clearly a significant health threat in the world. Its relationship with cardiovascular disease is established. It is also the leading cause of blindness in people 25-74 years of age in the US. Obviously determining nutritional benefits and dietary influences that can lead to lower blood sugar are not only exciting but should be continuously researched. If you have diabetes or are considered pre-diabetic, contact our offices in Stillwater at 405-372-1715 or Pawnee at 918-762-2573 for an eye health examination today.