At the 2026 ADA Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, a team from Leicester launched a three-paper Lancet Series on cardiometabolic multimorbidity — and the agenda tells you exactly where the diabetes conversation is right now.
What the Lancet Series Covers
The Leicester/NIHR ARC East Midlands team presented three new papers in The Lancet on June 8, covering the epidemiology, biological mechanisms, and interventions for cardiometabolic multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs). The series focuses on conditions that commonly cluster — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease — and argues for a more integrated approach to managing them together.
The biological pathways paper identifies shared mechanisms across these conditions: insulin resistance, adiposity, and chronic inflammation. It also links air pollution, early-life exposures, altered gut microbiome, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, genetic susceptibility, and epigenetic changes to disease progression and clustering.
This is significant research. Multimorbidity is real, and the call for integrated care is reasonable. The Lancet is one of the most rigorous peer-reviewed journals in medicine, and the Leicester team is doing serious work.
Where Reversal Fits in This Picture
But here’s the question worth sitting with: when the world’s biggest diabetes conference puts multimorbidity at the center of its agenda, where does actual reversal fit?
The standard care pathway for type 2 diabetes has historically been built around progression — diagnose, medicate, add medications, escalate. The Lancet series acknowledges this implicitly: it’s about managing multiple conditions that cluster together, not about reversing the underlying metabolic dysfunction.
Reversal — defined as A1c 5.9% or lower with no diabetes medications, sustained — is a different outcome. It’s not “better management of multimorbidity.” It’s the absence of the disease state that creates the multimorbidity in the first place. For patients who want to understand what a structured reversal protocol actually involves, the approach targets the same biology the Leicester papers identify — insulin resistance, adiposity, and chronic inflammation — with a different goal.
What the Research Shows About Reversal
Independent research has demonstrated that structured, intensive lifestyle and nutrition interventions can
produce sustained reversal of type 2 diabetes. The Newcastle University studies, published in peer-reviewed journals, showed that a low-calorie dietary intervention could normalize blood sugar and pull participants off diabetes medications. The original Counterpoint study and follow-up work demonstrated that beta-cell function could recover when the underlying fat deposits in the liver and pancreas were reduced.
This isn’t alternative medicine. It’s published in The Lancet, the same journal that just published the Leicester
multimorbidity series. The difference is the outcome being measured: management of multiple conditions versus resolution of the primary one.
What Patients Are Asking This Week
The most common question in our clinic this week: “If the biggest diabetes conference in the world is talking about managing multiple conditions, does that mean reversal isn’t real?” The answer is no — it means the conference agenda hasn’t caught up with what independent research has already demonstrated. Reversal has been documented in peer-reviewed studies for over a decade. The constraint has been that the standard care
pathway hasn’t historically offered it as a first-line option.
The patient demand for actual reversal is real and growing. More people are asking why they’re being prescribed a second or third medication when the underlying condition — the metabolic dysfunction driving the blood sugar problem — could be addressed directly. That’s not a rejection of medication. It’s a request for the full menu of options to be on the table.
What to Watch Next
Three things worth tracking in the coming months:
- Whether the ADA and EASD update their Standards of Care to include reversal as an explicit outcome
alongside glycemic management. - Whether more peer-reviewed research emerges on the durability of reversal beyond 12 and 24 months
— the data so far is promising, but longer-term outcomes are still being studied. - Whether primary care providers begin offering structured reversal programs as a first-line option for
newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, rather than starting with medication by default.
Bottom Line
If your goal is better management of diabetes alongside other conditions, the ADA 2026 agenda and the Lancet multimorbidity series are pointing in a useful direction. If your goal is actual reversal — getting off medications and sustaining normal blood sugar — there’s a different path that’s been demonstrated in independent research. Both deserve to be on the table. See what the reversal approach looks like in
practice.
By:
Dr. Jeffrey Hockings
Co-Founder/CEO
Diabetes Reversal Group
Kristine Burke, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Diabetes Reversal Group