Low blood sugar won’t harm brain

Tightly controlling the blood sugar levels of diabetics, even with the attendant risk of dangerously low levels of blood glucose, does not damage mental abilities, researchers have found.

Patients did not suffer in tests of intelligence, memory, coordination, language and other mental abilities, they reported in the May 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It certainly helps decrease a worry that I get asked about a lot,” Dr. Alan Jacobson of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

The study followed patients with Type 1 diabetes for an average of 18 years, comparing the mental skills of 588 who received intensive treatment with 556 getting conventional care.

Those in the intensive care group were three times more likely to have had episodes of coma or seizures caused by low blood sugar, also known as hypoglycemia. But “our study found no evidence of substantial long-term declines in cognitive function,” researchers reported .