New Multispecialty Guidelines for Managing Diabetes, Cardiometabolic Diseases

A new set of multi-specialty practice recommendations detailing management of patients with diabetes and cardiorenal metabolic diseases has been released by the Diabetes, CardioRenal Metabolic Diseases (DCRM) Task Force at the 19th Annual World Congress on Insulin Resistance, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease (WCIRDC), hosted by The Metabolic Institute of America.

Aimed at providing primary care providers and specialists an updated overview of recommendations for effective and wholistic management of these patients, the review is the result of a collaborative effort from more than 30 experts in diabetes, cardiology, nephrology, and other metabolic conditions, including past presidents and senior leaders of major societies like the American Diabetes Association (ADA), American Heart Association (AHA), American Association of Clinical Endocrinology (AACE), Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA), American College of Cardiology (ACC), Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) and others.

“We have developed the DCRM Practice Recommendations- a multispecialty consensus on the comprehensive management of diabetes, cardiorenal and metabolic diseases- to fill a void by creating, for the first time, practice recommendations for these complex patients. Contemporary CVOTs results transcend beyond the traditional single medical field and reach across multiple disciplines,” said Yehuda Handelsman, Founder of the DCMi, Chair of DCRM Task Force, and Chair and Program Director of the annual WCIRDC Conference. “As such, no single medical society is truly capable of developing a multifaceted comprehensive guidance. This unique initiative incorporated multiple specialties: Cardiology, Endocrinology, Primary Care, and Nephrology in developing recommendations addressing the whole patient. These clinical recommendations will target the specialists and Primary Care clinicians alike, with focus on the non-experts, making the recommendations clinically relevant and simple to implement.”

Simultaneously presented at the 19th Annual WCIRDC meeting in Los Angeles and published in the Journal of Diabetes and Its Complications on December 3, the document includes 202 references and was the subject of a 1.5-hour presentation chaired by Handelsman that also included Matthew Budoff, MD, Daniel Einhorn, MD, Vivian Fonseca, MD, Jennifer Green, MD, George Grunberger, MD, Christian Mende, MD, and Erin D. Michos, MD. Unlike other contemporary guidelines, authors feel the multispecialty guideline provides a comprehensive overview of the management of diabetes by incorporating perspective from the 31-person DCRM Task Force across a wide variety of specialties and expertise not usually seen within other diabetes management guidelines.

“For example, in cardiology, we have heart failure experts, atherosclerosis experts, we have lipid management experts, to really help us focus in on the divergent information that’s available and come up with the most cogent cross-specialty recommendations that we could,” said Budoff, in an interview with HCPLive. “The big win will be as it trickles down to the physicians who treat patients on a day-to-day basis—them having a practical guideline rather than having to refer to 4 different guidelines and trying to merge the data to figure out what the next best step would be.”

These guidelines are available on-demand on the WCIRDC virtual conference platform and published in Journal of Diabetes and Its Complications.