Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

Heart Beat: Real age - diabetes

Heart Beat

Real age — diabetes

When it comes to your heart and blood vessels, diabetes adds 15 years to your age.

That's the conclusion of Canadian researchers who looked at almost 400,000 people with diabetes and 9 million without it. They collected information on when heart attacks, strokes, other cardiovascular trouble, and deaths occurred in the two groups. From this mountain of numbers they calculated the average age at which men and women in the diabetes and nondiabetes groups crossed from low heart disease risk (under 10 cases per 1,000 people) to moderate risk (10–19 cases per 1,000) and then high risk (20 or more cases per 1,000). Accounting for small differences between men and women, people with diabetes crossed into the high-risk category an average of 15 years earlier than those without diabetes. The more broadly the researchers defined heart disease risk, the more diabetes advanced one's cardiovascular age.

The take-home message from this work is that it's a good idea for people with diabetes to start paying attention to their hearts and arteries years before their counterparts without the disease. Daily exercise and a diet that minimizes blood sugar swings are appropriate for everyone with diabetes. What about more aggressive strategies for protecting the heart and blood vessels, such as taking a cholesterol-lowering statin, low-dose aspirin, and other cardioprotective drugs?

Writing in the July 3, 2006, Lancet, the researchers call for individualizing prevention strategies, especially for younger people (under age 40) with diabetes, some of whom may still be at low risk for having a heart attack or stroke. Upon crossing into the moderate-risk category, though, it's time to pull out all the stops.

Last updated:	September 05, 2008