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# Diabetes Treatment Goal Can Cause Problems: Reuters
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/diabetes-treatment-goal-can-cause-problems-reuters/
- Published: 2021-11-04T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T17:21:22.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5150523

A lengthy Reuters series on the U.S. battle against diabetes says the treatment goal to lower A1c below 7% pushed by makers of diabetes drugs is leading to cases of hypoglycemia that have significant adverse effects and can lead to death. “Pharmaceutical giants launched years-long marketing campaigns for a treatment target they helped create,” the [series](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-diabetes-overtreatment/?utm%5Fsource=Twitter&utm%5Fmedium=Social) says, “and as their sales of diabetes drugs soared, so did incidents of low blood sugar, a potentially deadly medication risk.”

The news service says its interviews with dozens of scientists, doctors, and patients and a review of hundreds of documents found that leading insulin makers began to promote A1c below 7% just as they were launching new formulations of insulin and other diabetes drugs that they then heavily marketed as a way for patients to reach their target.

“For years,” Reuters says, “diabetes was treated largely with generic drugs and conventional insulins. Then drugmakers launched a slew of more expensive patented drugs and promoted many of them as a way to reach an A1c below 7%. More than 50 new diabetes medications hit the market in the past two decades, comprising new formulations of insulin, as well as other injections and pills. To underpin its campaign, the industry cited research showing that achieving an A1c below 7% reduced the risk of the potentially deadly long-term complications of diabetes. Lost in the enthusiasm were warnings about adopting aggressive drug regimens to do that. The medications people with diabetes must take to lower their high blood glucose carry the risk of going too far, tipping a patient into hypoglycemic crisis.”

The article says the scientific warnings were prescient. It cites data showing that for much of the 1990s, hospitalization rates among the elderly for hyperglycemia resulting from uncontrolled diabetes, and hypoglycemia, primarily a side effect of treatment, were similar. But as drugmakers began promoting A1c below 7%, the hospitalization rate for hypoglycemia climbed to five times the rate for hyperglycemia in the next decade.

By 2016, it says, the last year for which government data are available, hospitalization rates had subsided as increasing awareness of the problem prompted fine-tuning of treatment guidelines. “Still,” it says, “as the pharmaceutical industry has continued to emphasize a lower A1c, hypoglycemia remains an outsized risk.”