Patient/disease features and glycemic targets in type 2 diabetes: Where do we stand?

Excerpt

Once again in 2015, the ADA and the EASD have opportunely pointed the need of a patient-centered approach for the management of hyperglycemia in individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) [1]. A HbA_1c cut off <7 % has been suggested with more or less stringent targets to be individually pursued according to patient/disease features (PDFs), including: (a) risks associated with hypoglycemia; (b) disease duration; (c) life expectancy; (d) comorbidities; (e) vascular complications; and (f) patient’s attitude. Since the ADA/EASD made clear that scale for such approach “is not designed to be applied rigidly but to be used as a broad construct to guide clinical decision making,” many clinicians will appreciate to be told how to measure the above-mentioned PDFs. We addressed this issue by firstly proposing a way to score individual PDFs and then investigating the distribution of such scores in a real-life clinical set. …