NYTimes: Big diabetes story (and it’s not all about insulin and blood sugar)

Published: August 20, 2007, 11:07 am

The Times has been running an occasional, and hefty, series “The Six Killers” on the primary medical causes of death in the US (whole set, so far, here). Gina Kolata has contributed to parts of the previous pieces. Today’s on diabetes is just about all Kolata. As she often does, Kolata finds a different angle, and hammers it. This looks like a good one. Americans with diabetes, she reports, generally have few clues to the danger they’re in. By focussing over much on blood sugar, and despite near-constant fussing by many over insulin titration, most pay little attention to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other worseners of the heart disease that often is the proximate killer. It’s been written many times in recent years that insulin therapy, by extending lives dramatically, has also revealed the many, discouraging ways that diabetes debilitates. Kolata’s make the point emphatically. This is not a sunny little diabetes advice package. It is

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