United States: According to the new study, a person is more than twice at risk of type 2 diabetes if he uses steroids.
Overall, people who have taken steroid pills, injections or infusions are 2. Twice as likely to have diabetes complications than steroids nonusers, other researchers said in a study Saturday at the EASD 2015 convention in Madrid.
The conclusions of this massive survey support earlier perceptions about the impact of steroids on blood sugar which in its turn increases diabetes likelihood, they noted.
As reported by the HealthDay, “Such information on new diabetes incidence, how much more frequent it is in patients receiving glucocorticoids, consists of insignificant research involving patients with one or a few diseases at most,” the lead researcher of the study, Dr Rajna Golubic, a lecturer of diabetes and endocrinology of the University of Oxford, notes.

“We wanted to increase the data to be able to get a more precise estimate of the probability of people developing diabetes while taking those drugs. ”
Steroids are utilised in the management of a number of pathologic conditions given their ability to suppress inflammation. Some of the examples entail asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer.
However, they also raise blood sugar because they affect the ability of cells in absorbing glucose and cause insulin resistance as Deities UK notes.
To know whether this effect on blood sugar could facilitate diabetes, the research team collected data of more than 450000 people who were treated between 2013 to 2023 at Oxford University Hospital.
At baseline, none of the people had diabetes, and all had been off steroids for 8 weeks when the study began.
Over the course of the study, a total of 32 patients, or 3.9% started on steroids during their hospitalization, including prednisone, hydrocortisone and dexamethasone. Among all patients, 2 percent of patients on steroids developed type 2 diabetes, while less than 1 percent of patients who did not receive steroids did, studies showed.
When age and the sex were factored in the steroids which increased the people risk of the diabetes by 2.6 times said the health experts.
These latest results given the clinical staff a better estimate of how likely the new diabetes is to occur and could prompt doctors to plan clinical care more effectively to identify and manage the news diabetes and which is stated by Golubic.
People regularly taking steroids for the asthma and the arthritis and should be monitored for the diabetes which is also added by Golubic .
And here just because these findings were presented at the medical meeting and they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer reviewed journal.
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