This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Diabetes risk rises with increasing arterial stiffness
The risk for incident diabetes in adults is increased as arterial stiffness worsens regardless of other risk factors and suggests that arterial stiffness may be a predictor for the development of diabetes, study data show.
Iram Faqir Muhammad, a doctoral student in the department of clinical sciences at Lund University in Malmö, Sweden, and colleagues evaluated data from the Malmö Diet and Cancer cardiovascular cohort on 2,450 adults (mean age, 71.9 years) to assess the relationship between arterial stiffness and the incidence of diabetes.
Arterial stiffness was measured by carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity. Incidence of diabetes in the tertiles of carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity were compared using Cox proportional hazards regression, and the lowest tertile was used as the reference range. Follow-up was a mean of 4.4 years.
Through follow-up, 2.8% of participants developed diabetes, for an incidence of 6.27 per 1,000 person-years in the whole population, 7.06 per 1,000 person-years in men and 5.82 per 1,000 person-years in women.
The risk for diabetes was significantly higher for participants in the third tertile compared with those in the first (HR = 3.41; 95% CI, 1.63-7.14) after adjustment for age, sex, mean arterial pressure and average heart rate, and the risk remained significantly higher after adjustment for additional covariates (HR = 3.24; 95% CI, 1.51-6.97).
The risk for diabetes decreased but remained significantly higher in participants in the third tertile compared with the first tertile (HR = 2.18; 95% CI, 1.003-4.719) after adjustment for HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, 2-hour post-oral glucose tolerance test plasma glucose and family history of diabetes.
The risk for diabetes was not significant in participants with normal fasting glucose or glucose tolerance.
“The results of this prospective population-based study suggest that there is an association between [carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity] and risk of incident diabetes,” the researchers wrote. “Certainly, this is an interesting finding and requires further epidemiological and mechanistic research in this direction to understand the elusive mechanism connecting these two entities.” – by Amber Cox
Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.