Abstract

Abstract Background Randomized studies have shown that sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) reduce major cardiovascular events in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, it is not known whether there are significant sex-based differences in the cardioprotective role of SGLT-2 inhibitors. Purpose To investigate whether sex differences exist in reduction of major cardiovascular events (MACE)in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus when treated with SGLT2i. Methods A comprehensive PubMed search was conducted using keywords, (“Diabetes” AND (“Dapagliflozin” OR “Empagliflozin” OR “Canagliflozin” OR “Ertugliflozin”) AND “Outcomes”) that resulted in a total of 221 studies. Studies were included in our meta-analysis if they were randomized controlled trials, placebo-controlled, reported MACE as the primary outcome and reported sex-based subgroup analyses of these outcomes. Only 2 RCTs (EMPA-REG and DECLARE-TIMI 58) met our inclusion criteria.The sex-based event data for both trials was pooled to calculate risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Analyses was performed using Comprehensive Meta-analysis (CMA) software. Fixed effect models, random effect models and mixed effect models were used. Results Pooled datafrom the 2 RCTs (EMPA-REG and DECLARE-TIMI 58) resulted in a total of 24,180 patients who were included in our primary analysis. Of these, 2331 patients were reported to have MACE. In our pooled data, SGLT2i reduced MACE in patients with diabetes with an overall risk ratio of 0.92 (0.85–0.99), p=0.03 (I2=0, p=0.31)using fixed effect model (Table 1). We also performed subgroup analysis of the pooled data categorizing by sex and using mixed effect model. Our subgroup analysis by sex showed a Q statistic of 1.88 with p-value of 0.17 suggesting that there is no significant difference in MACE reduction between men and women with diabetes when treated with SGLT2i. However, on further analyzing the sex differences in the individual trials, we found that women may have greater reduction in MACE compared with their male counterparts (RR in females: 0.66 (0.42–1.04); RR in males: 0.92 (0.84–1.00)), however this finding did not meet statistical significance (Table 2). Conclusion Our meta-analysis included the pooled data from 2 major RCTs (EMPA-REG and DECLARE-TIMI 58) assessing the cardioprotective role of SGLT2i in diabetic patients and shows that SGLT2i significantly reduce the risk of major adverse CV events in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, we did not find any significant sex-based differences in reduction of MACE between men and women with diabetes when treated with SGLT2i.

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