Medha Munshi: tailoring diabetes care for older patients.

摘要

As knowledge about diabetes has increased, treatments have become more effective, but also more complex. For older people, this presents especially difficult challenges, which are often not taken into account by physicians. "This means that the treatment can sometimes do more harm than the disease", says Medha Munshi, Director of the Geriatric Diabetes Clinic at Joslin Diabetes Center and a staff geriatrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both teaching and research affiliates of Harvard Medical School. She adds that "Most older patients with diabetes also have other illnesses and can be easily overwhelmed by the complicated care regimens for diabetes." These patients need a special level of care-and with a different outcome goal-that is distinct from that needed by younger adults, explains Munshi, who is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "When you talk about older patients, the risk and benefit ratio changes", she says.