Diabetes mellitus in coronary artery disease

Abstract

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background Morbidity and mortality are increased in patients with myocardial infarction that also have co-existing diabetes mellitus (DM) making it an important risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD). Overall, diabetes mellitus worsens the prognosis in CAD patients. Purpose This paper was done from a study, that enabled us to measure the prevalence of diabetes mellitus in patients with coronary artery disease, in relevance to other CAD risk factors (age, gender, systolic blood pressure, LDL-C and smoking). These results would give us the ability to compare it with the outcomes of the EUROSPIRE IV study published in 2015 (1). Methods Retrospective observational study of consecutive patients from the Registry of Cyprus Heart Survey, examined in the Cardiology Clinic of Nicosia General Hospital, between the years 2011-14. The total number of patients was 371 (11.5% females and 88.4% males). These patients had a history of myocardial infarction and underwent either a PCI or a CABG. Results From the total amount of patients, 36.9% had history of diabetes mellitus. The percentage adjusted to gender shows that 44% of females and 35.6% of males included in the study had diabetes. The mean age of people that had diabetes and coronary artery disease was 68.65 (CI: 67.18, 70.12). The prevalence of diabetics with hypertension and coronary artery disease was 75.91% while the average systolic blood pressure (SBP) was 138 mmHg (CI: 135.33, 140.67). The systolic blood pressure was ≥140 mmHg in half of the diabetic individuals. Smoking was also assessed as a risk factor in patients with diabetes and CAD. The prevalence of ex-smokers was 28.46%, of smokers 18.24% and of non-smokers 53.28%. Finally, values of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) were measured in 90.5% of diabetic patients, 88.7% of them had an LDL-C ≥1.8 mmol/L (≥70mg/dL) and 53.22% had an LDL-C ≥2.5 mmol/L (≥100mg/dL). The average LDL-C value was 109.19 mg/dL. Conclusions The outcome of the study revealed that a substantial number of patients with CAD suffer from diabetes. Therefore, diabetes was verified as a major risk factor in patients with CAD and the development of acute coronary syndrome. Regarding those patients, other risk factors proved to have a negative impact on their cardiovascular health. Moreover, the risk factors in patients with DM and CAD of this study were compared with the well known study, EUROASPIRE IV (1). The prevalence of diabetes in the present study was 36.9%, compared to 26.8% in EUROASPIRE IV, indicating a higher prevalence in our study. We concluded that marked reduction in the events of myocardial infarction can be seen if we reduce the prevalence of uncontrolled diabetes mellitus occurrences with medication or better control of the risk factors of CAD early in the diagnosis to reduce complications.