Opinion controversy to chromium picolinate therapy’s safety and efficacy: ignoring ‘anecdotes’ of case reports or recognising individual risks and new guidelines urgency to introduce innovation by predictive diagnostics?

As a consequence of the accumulating clinical data and knowledge about the epidemiology and pathological mechanisms of the most frequent causes of morbidity and mortality, we are currently reconsidering our view of the origins and progression of cardiovascular, oncologic and neurodegenerative diseases. The majority of these pathologies are of chronic nature: they progress from precursor lesions over one or even several decades of life; therefore, it is often too late for effective therapeutic intervention. An excellent example is the epidemic scale of type 2 diabetes mellitus witnessed in the European Union. In most industrialised countries and countries with large populations, the permanently growing cohort of diabetics creates a serious healthcare problem and a dramatic health economic burden. The estimate for diabetes prevalence in the years 2025–2030 is half a billion patients worldwide (see Figure 1).Moreover, the contemporary onset of the dominant type 2 diabetes was already observed in subpopulations of teenagers [3]. Severe complications secondary to early onset of diabetes mellitus, such as retinopathy, nephropathy, silent ischaemia, dementia and cancer (Figure 2), soon may lead to collapsing healthcare systems [4].Optimistic versus pessimistic prognosis in future developments of the healthcare sector depends much on diagnostic, preventive and treatment approaches which diabetes care will preferably adopt in the near future. Without innovation in healthcare, diabetes-related complications may cause such a dramatic level of burden that any performance of personalised medicine will not be feasible from an economical point of view. In contrast, effective utilisation of advanced early/predictive diagnostics and targeted prevention could enable rapidly ageing populations in Europe and elsewhere to be economically effective for the society. Therefore, it is timely to consider the integrative medical approaches to advance pre/diabetes care utilising the innovation