The diabetes trial failure

The "failure" of a major diabetes study has reporters and their sources wringing their hands.

This should not be. (The picture is from the WebMD's doctors' site, medicinenet.)

Science often makes wrong turns, especially when it's applied in the form of engineering or products.

The most notorious example was the advice given President Eisenhower in the 1950s, after his heart attack, to disdain butter in favor of margarine. Later we learned margarine is filled with trans-fatty acids, which are even worse for you than butter.

Oops.

If this, and the recent cholesterol studies, tell us anything it should be that common diseases are more complex than we think, that there is no magic bullet, no single variable whose control yields a certain cure.

Your cholesterol number, by itself, is not a predictor of heart disease. Your blood sugar number, by itself, is not a predictor of damage from diabetes.

In the case of heart disease we're learning that the enzymes and proteins which dispose of cholesterol may be keys to understanding how the conditions of plaque can occur.

But it may be other things are involved as well, such as the conditions of the blood vessels that cause plaque to deposit on them.

In the case of diabetes, new studies involving enzymes, proteins and genes may well yield new clues as to how the disease progresses and how to deal with it.

So this "failure" actually represents an enormous opportunity for the research community. Anyone whose study was rejected because, the funders said, the problem has been solved should be taking another look.

Thus it's the study that delivers "bad" news which may be far more important than one that delivers"good" news, in the long run. Because it's the former you can learn from.

Now how do we get this word through the lips of the popular press?