Opinion
Video
Improving Patient Outcomes Beyond Glycemic Control
Author(s):
Panelists discuss how GLP-1 receptor agonists represent a paradigm shift by providing weight loss, glycemic control, and cardiovascular protection simultaneously, moving focus beyond A1C control to comprehensive risk reduction.
Breaking the Vicious Cycle
Traditional diabetes management often creates a vicious cycle where poor blood sugar control leads to increased insulin use, promoting weight gain and worsening insulin resistance. This cycle results in patients becoming more sedentary due to joint pain and requiring even more insulin. Breaking this pattern requires stopping the metaphorical flywheel spinning in the wrong direction and creating a virtuous cycle instead.
The new treatment approach focuses on addressing root causes by promoting weight loss, which decreases insulin resistance and reduces insulin requirements. As patients continue losing weight, joint pain improves, enabling increased physical activity that further supports weight loss. This comprehensive strategy treats obesity not as a stigmatized condition but as adipose tissue dysfunction syndrome, addressing the inflammatory nature of excess fat tissue.
Understanding obesity as an inflammatory disease helps explain conditions like metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), where fat in the liver causes inflammation, scarring, and damage. This inflammation likely affects other organs throughout the body. The paradigm shift toward treating obesity as the parent condition of multiple metabolic disorders offers hope for addressing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other related conditions more effectively.
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