CHICAGO (Reuters) – For many years, diabetes  experts assumed that the closer they could get a diabetic  patient’s blood sugar level to what is considered normal, the  better.

But recent studies now suggest that a more tailored  treatment approach, taking into account age and other health  problems, may be a better way to go to control heart disease.

“How sick a patient is matters and how long they’ve had  diabetes matters,” said Dr Elbert Huang, a clinical and health  care policy researcher at the University of Chicago.

“Those are new ideas that no one really ever suspected,”  Huang said in a telephone interview.

Aggressive treatment strategies that use drugs, diet and  exercise to dramatically reduce blood sugar levels have been shown to reduce the risks of diabetic complications such as  blindness and kidney disease.

But recent studies looking at whether intensive treatment  helps prevent the most deadly complications of diabetes —  heart attacks and strokes — have been mixed.

A federally sponsored trial called ACCORD was stopped in  February 2008 because there were 20 per cent more deaths among  diabetics with heart problems who got intensive treatment  compared to those who were treated more conservatively.

An international trial of aggressive measures to control  blood sugar, however, found no signs that such treatment  increases the risk of death.

Since then, several teams have been working to make sense  of the findings.

Last spring, researchers said a trial of older veterans  with diabetes found that people who started intensive treatment  within the first 15 years of diagnosis had fewer heart risks.

But in people who started intensive treatment more than 20  years after their diabetes diagnosis, the heart risks doubled.

This week, a study of diabetics in Italy published in the  Annals of Internal Medicine offers some clues about why. It  found that strictly controlling blood glucose levels in  patients with other serious health problems did not reduce  their risk of a heart attack or stroke.

But they did find that firm glucose control — defined as  keeping haemoglobin A1c, a measure of long-term blood sugar  control, levels below 7 per cent — did cut heart risks in  diabetics with few other health concerns.