New research shows that aggressive use of drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure may help to reverse heart disease in adults with type 2 diabetes.

People suffering from type 2 diabetes “are two to four times more likely than people without diabetes to die from heart disease,” said Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and blood Institute who led the study.

She and her team followed 499 Native American adults with type 2 diabetes for three years. Native Americans are known to be at high rate of diabetes. Half of the participants were treated to meet the current standard, which is a systolic blood pressure of 130 or lower and LDL cholesterol of 100 or lower. The other half aimed for a systolic of 115 or lower and LDL of 70 or lower.

The results showed that participants in the second group (who had their cholesterol and blood pressure lowered more than usually), had their arteries thickened. The treatment they were administered also helped reverse damage to the heart.

“This study provides good news for adults with type 2 diabetes. For the first time, we have evidence that aggressively lowering LDL cholesterol and blood pressure can actually reverse damage to the arteries in middle-aged adults with diabetes,” Nabel said, according to Reuters.

“We found that in the aggressive group there was actually a reduction in the thickness of the vessel in the neck as compared to the standard group whose neck vessels got a little bit worse ... That has not been seen in most studies,” Barbara Howard co-author of the study said.

The study also showed that the heart size decreased from baseline in both groups, the beneficial change was significantly greater among patients in the aggressive treatment group.

All the participants in the study reached their blood pressure and cholesterol goal levels, this way preventing heart attacks and stroke.

The researchers concluded that it is possible, if the treatment continued longer, that the numbers of heart attack and strokes would be cut significantly.

In an editorial accompanying the study in the April 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Eric D. Peterson, a professor of medicine at Duke University, disagrees with aggressive treatment of high blood pressure saying, “It would seem, based on what we have here, hard to justify ultraintensive hypertension reduction when we haven't shown benefit from a clinical viewpoint.”

According to the NHLBI, diabetes kills an estimated 284,000 people in the U.S. each year, up to 65 percent of them from heart and artery disease.