Achieving Optimal Cardiovascular Health in Type 2 Diabetes, with Joshua Joseph, MD, MPH

On January 10, the American Heart Association (AHA) released a new scientific statement detailing trends in the rate of patients with type 2 diabetes reaching optimal management of cardiovascular risk factors and provides recommendations for improving the rate, which the statement authors suggest is currently below 20%.

Composed on behalf of the AHA’s Diabetes Committee of the Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health and several other AHA councils, the statement describes gaps between evidence-based recommendations and clinical practice hampering the optimal management of cardiovascular risk factors among patients with type 2 diabetes.

“In the United States, less than 1 in 5 adults with T2D not diagnosed with cardiovascular disease are meeting optimal T2D management goals of not smoking and achieving healthy levels of blood sugar, blood pressure and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, also known as ‘bad’ cholesterol,” said Joshua J. Joseph, MD, MPH, FAHA, chair of the statement writing group and an assistant professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, in a statement from the AHA.

With an interest in diving deeper into the statement and priorities of the writing committee, Practical Cardiology reached out to Joseph and that conversation can be found below.