New ideas please

doi:10.1136/bmj.39056.616898.47

BMJ 2006;333 (9 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39056.616898.47

Editor's Choice

Editor's choice

New ideas please

Trish Groves, deputy editor

tgroves@bmj.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Did you know that diabetes kills 3.8 millionpeople worldwide each year, around the same number as HIV/AIDS?Good glycaemic control will at least lower the risk of cardiovasculardisease in diabetes, but it's hard to achieve. R J Heine andcolleagues, in their guidelines on hyperglycaemia in type 2diabetes, unpick the tangle of treatment options (p 1200 doi:10.1136/bmj.39022.462546.80). The authors, who are based inthe Netherlands, Cameroon, and Boston, say their proposed managementalgorithms will help doctors even where resources are poor.But treatments to alter the relentless decline of $beta$ cell functionand the clinical course of diabetes are still a long way off.Lifestyle change remains, for now, the potentially most effectiveand most difficult intervention, and we need better evidenceand new ideas to make it happen.