HN Reader

>These three disorders could really be “CKM syndrome,” which can be treated with drugs like Ozempic

The article is trying so hard not to say that obesity is the cause. I call it the obesity pipeline: You start off young and obese and you don't have diabetes and it's all fine. Stay obese long enough and you get diabetes -> metformin. Stay in a diabetic state long enough and you get heart disease -> statins. These are obesity comorbidities.

> Amy Bies was recovering in the hospital from injuries inflicted during a car accident in May 2007

When an article starts like this, I instantly close it and wait for proper sources. Anyway, the phrase "metabolic syndrome" has been gaining currency for the last few years. For those who don't want to read journal papers and meta-analyses, there are plenty of doctors and fitness coaches (on YouTube) who have made videos on how to get metabolic syndrome under control or even reverse it. And many of the doctors do a good job of filtering and summarizing the research.

> The ties are so strong that in 2023 the American Heart Association grouped the conditions under one name: cardio-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM), with “metabolic syndrome” referring to diabetes and obesity.

Seems like this is mostly an extension of the previously existing label of metabolic syndrome, now including kidney. Ozempic is mentioned and I take that to mean obesity is the cause. But are some of these ailments like diabetes reversible?

There are 90 year olds with 60 years of diabetes and no complications and 40 year olds with 3 years of diabetes and devastating complications. Same for heart and kidney disease. They cannot be put in the same basket. No matter how much they try to push GLP-1's for everything under the sun, they are not.

If they find the drug of immortality, I am sure they will name every disease "partial death".

HbA1c, or just diabetes as a binary variable, has been one of the main inputs into predicting heart attack risk for a long time.

The main marker of kidney function, eGFR, was added with the AHA/ACC's PREVENT equations in 2023.

I wrote a bit about the science behind heart risk calculators, and their various inputs like cholesterol, blood pressure, A1c, eGFR, and so on here: https://www.empirical.health/blog/heart-attack-risk-calculat...

It is all interconnected, but I am unsure about the claim made. The reason is simple: there can be numerous disease types. Person A may have different genetics than Person B, as one example, so responses of a body may be different for that reason alone; then there is lifestyle choice, health, age and so forth. So I don't agree with the claim in the title here that all is one ailment - that makes no sense to me.