Video transcript
One of the great game changer papers, as everybody knows, was the DCCT in 1993. Now, one paper from the more recent publications is one which I think is a game changer. It may not have been noticed by many people, but it’s certainly one which I personally find very important. One of the questions that was being asked was if somebody is exposed to recurrent severe hypoglycaemia over a period of years, would this have a detrimental effect on their cognitive function? I’m honorary professor of diabetes at the University of Edinburgh and for many years was a consultant physician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. One of the great game changer papers, as everybody knows, was the DCCT in 1993. And that, of course, completely convinced everybody that strict glycaemic control was essential if we were going to avoid long-term complications. And, of course, there's been a spin-off of multiple papers from the original DCCT, which, of course, also extended into the EDIC. That's the extension study where patients were no longer put in particular treatment groups, but they were followed up by the original investigators for over 30 years. Now, one paper from the more recent publications is one which I think is a game changer. It may not have been noticed by many people, but it’s certainly one which I personally find very important. One of the questions that was being asked was if somebody is exposed to recurrent severe hypoglycaemia over a period of years, would this have a detrimental effect on their cognitive function? And, of course, they followed up the cognitive function throughout the original ten years or so of the DCCT. But they did it again at about 18 years, and there was no obvious change at all. Everything seemed fine. Cognitive impairment was not evident. But then the study was done and published in 2021 in “The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology” and that's the effect on cognitive function at 32 years. So, here were a group of people with type 1 diabetes who now were considerably older, and what you then found was there'd been quite a significant decline in cognitive function. And the three things which affected that were a high haemoglobin A1c, an elevated systolic blood pressure, and, most importantly, exposure to recurrent severe hypoglycaemia. Now, one of the limitations of this study was that there was no non-diabetic control group who were matched for age and who could be compared who were matched for age and who could be compared after the same period of time to see if ageing itself was having an effect on cognitive function, but these patients were mostly in their 50s and 60s. This was before you would really expect to see any ageing effect on cognitive decline. So, this is a very important paper. It fits in with other studies which have also implicated severe hypoglycaemia in causing cognitive effects. But because it's the DCCT and one of the sort of gold standard studies in this whole field, I think this is one of the reasons why it's so important.