BP curb among diabetics doesn't lower death risks

They found that using a combination of drugs to keep diabetic patients’ top blood pressure readings below 130 offered no benefit over those whose top reading was below 140 - the cutoff point for high blood pressure.

“Clearly, patients and doctors work very hard to get diabetic patients’ blood pressure to less than 130. Our data would suggest maybe we can stop at two drugs instead of three. And maybe we can spend a little more time talking about diet and exercise and cholesterol,” Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff of the University of Florida and colleagues wrote.

Cooper-DeHoff said her team looked specifically at 6,400 diabetics with heart disease taking part in an international trial that examined different combinations of several common drug treatments to control blood pressure.

After about five years, they categorised people according to the level of blood pressure. “What we found was that the tight control group - those with systolic blood pressure of 130 - did no better with regard to the overall outcome of death, heart attack or stroke,” she said.