Diabetes Worsens HF Risk in Heart Disease Patients

In patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) with previous myocardial infarction (MI), the risk for heart failure is significantly higher in those who also have diabetes compared with those without diabetes, according to a recent study.

IHD is known to be the strongest risk factor for HF. However, less is known about the impact of diabetes on this risk.
________________________________________________________________________________

RELATED CONTENT
Diabetes Risk Lowered By Antioxidants
Statin Use Linked to Increased Diabetes Risk
________________________________________________________________________________

To explore this potential relationship further, the researchers identified 14,407 patients with IHD. Patient data were obtained from the NHANES Epidemiologic Follow-Up Study, as well as the facility and mortality files through 1992.

Failure curves were used to determine the cumulative incidence of HF in patients with IHD and diabetes compared with patients with only IHD. Important covariates were taken into account using Cox proportional hazards models. All analyses included weights and clustering variables.

Ultimately, the present analyses were restricted to patients with IHD without prevalent HF at baseline (n = 497). Results showed that HF had occurred in 38.1% of patients with diabetes (n = 63) vs 26.5% of patients without diabetes (n = 434). The adjusted multivariate hazard ratio for incident HF among patients with previous MI and diabetes is 2.98, compared with those with only MI.

“Among participants with MI, those with diabetes had a substantially higher incidence of HF than those without diabetes,” the researchers concluded. “Based on these findings, practitioners should focus greater attention on patients with diabetes and previous MI in order to potentially prevent incident HF.”

—Christina Vogt

Reference:

Patel N, Chen O, Donahue C, et al. Impact of diabetes on heart failure incidence in adults with ischemic heart disease. J Diabetes Complications. 2017;31(11):1597-1601.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jdiacomp.2017.07.011.