Little progress has been made in lowering blood pressure in people with diabetes, despite publication of increasingly aggressive treatment guidelines. A study published in the January 2007 issue of Diabetes Care reported this disappointing finding.

The study compared hypertension control in people with and without diabetes from 1995 to 2005. Blood pressure goals were reduced twice in that period-in 1997 and in 2003-but the changes "did not lead to substantially better hypertension control for diabetics compared with nondiabetic patients," researchers said. The findings are consistent with other recent studies showing that health care providers fail to aggressively treat high blood pressure in people with diabetes, despite the fact that hypertension is a major sign of cardiovascular disease, the leading killer of people with diabetes.

The researchers concluded that identifying effective interventions to deal with the challenge of hypertension control in people with diabetes should be a top priority for future research.

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Hispanic women are at higher risk for heart disease, according to a study done at the University of Rochester in New York. The researchers found that heart disease risk in Hispanic women is comparable to heart disease risk of Caucasian women who are about 10 years older.

Seventy-nine Hispanic (average age 53) and 91 Caucasian (average age 63) women participated in the study, which measured each woman's waist circumference, activity level, weight, height, blood pressure, and blood glucose and cholesterol levels. The heart disease risk for the two groups was about the same, and researchers noticed that the prehypertension rate (slightly elevated blood pressure that indicates a likelihood of developing hypertension in the future) for the Hispanic women (32%) was significantly higher than for the Caucasian women (19%).

The study suggests that Hispanic women develop cardiac risk factors earlier than Caucasian women, and health care providers should more aggressively treat and help prevent heart disease at an earlier age in this population.