Heart Disease Risk: Women Under 55 With Diabetes

Women, who are under 55, with Type-2 diabetes are at greater risk of developing coronary heart disease, a new study suggests. The study indicates that women, who are less than 55 years and Type-2 diabetes, had a tenfold greater risk of having coronary heart disease over the next two decades, with lipoprotein insulin resistance (LPIR) proving to be a strong, predictive biomarker as well.

"We're going to see, unfortunately, younger and younger people having heart attacks," said co-author Samia Mora, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in the US. "When a younger individual has a cardiovascular event, it will affect their quality of life going forward, their productivity, and their contribution to society," Mora added.

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For the study, published in the journal JAMA Cardiology, the researchers analyzed more than 50 risk factors in 28,024 women who participated in the decade-long study. The team analyzed approximately 50 biomarkers associated with cardiovascular health.

Commonly used metrics like low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (or "bad" cholesterol) and hemoglobin A1C (a measure of blood sugar levels) had much weaker associations with coronary heart disease onset in women younger than 55 years than LPIR, a newer metric for insulin resistance.

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LPIR uses a weighted combination of six lipoprotein measures and is analyzed through specialized laboratory testing. Whereas LDL cholesterol was only associated with a 40 percent increase in risk of coronary heart disease onset in women under 55, LPIR demonstrated a sixfold (600 per cent) increase.

"Diabetes is mostly preventable, but it's a systems-wide problem, and we urgently need further research into new strategies to address it," Mora said.

"These could be innovative lifestyle-based strategies, like community efforts, greater public health efforts, ways to medically target metabolic pathways, or new surgical approaches," Mora noted. (IANS)