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Younger Adults With Type 2 Diabetes 14 Times More Likely to Suffer Heart Attacks

Posted: Thursday, October 30, 2003

Young adults, age 18-44, who get type 2 diabetes are 14 times more likely to suffer a heart attack and up to 30 times more likely to have a stroke than their peers without diabetes Stroke Risk Increased Up to 30 Times.

Young women account for almost all the increase in heart attack risk, while young men are twice as likely to suffer a stroke as young women. The study by two researchers at Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research (CHR), funded by the American Diabetes Association, will appear in the November issue of Diabetes Care.

"This means that huge numbers of people are going to get heart disease, heart attacks and strokes years, sometimes even decades, before they should," says Teresa Hillier, MD, an endocrinologist and investigator at CHR and lead author of the article. "Young adults are increasingly likely to be overweight and diabetic. Our study is the first to look at the health outcomes of young adults who get diabetes, and the greatly increased risks of heart attack and stroke are very alarming."

To conduct the study, Dr. Hillier and her colleague used electronic medical records to identify 7,844 individuals who were newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes from 1996 to 1998 (1,600 were under age 45 and 6,244 were 45 or older). Other findings included the following:

-- People with early-onset type 2 diabetes are 80% more likely to need insulin therapy within two years than people with usual-onset type 2 diabetes.

-- People with early-onset diabetes were significantly more obese on average than people with usual-onset diabetes (BMI 37 vs. 33).(1)

-- Younger adults with diabetes were more than twice as likely as older adults with diabetes to develop any heart disease compared to their peers without diabetes.

"We are clearly facing a very serious public health problem," says Dr. Hillier. "The CDC is predicting that at least one out of every three Americans born after 2000 are going to develop diabetes, and the trend we've seen of diabetes affecting young adults -- and even teenagers -- is going to continue. Young women with diabetes who have a heart attack are more likely to die from it in the hospital than men, so our finding that young women with diabetes are 14 times more likely to have a heart attack is especially alarming."

Reference:
(1) Note: a 5'10" man with a BMI of 37 weighs 258 pounds, a 5'5" woman with a BMI of 37 weighs 222 pounds. Source: Kaiser Permanente.

Source: Diabetes in Control.com