Coronary artery surgery can prevent heart failure in people with diabetes!

Zee Media Bureau

London: Heart disease is common in people with diabetes. Type 2 diabetes – a chronic condition in which your body does not use insulin properly - substantially increases the lifetime risk of both developing and dying from heart failure.

Symptoms of Type 2 diabetes include – constant hunger, increased thirst, frequent urination, fatigue, weight loss, blurred vision, dry mouth and itchy skin.

Heart failure is a common condition among people with Type 2 diabetes. However, a new study suggests that individuals with Type 2 diabetes who had undergone coronary artery surgery prior to their heart failure diagnosis have better chances of survival in the long term.

Over 90% of the patients with Type 2 diabetes have one or more other precursors of heart failure, such as high blood pressure, COPD or atrial fibrillation, diseases to which effective treatments are available that improve the chances of long-term survival, the study said.

Heart failure in people with Type 2 diabetes is often attributable to atherosclerotic coronary artery disease (CAD) -- damage or disease in the heart's major blood vessels, and such people are given either a bypass operation or catheter balloon dilation.

"Our study indicates that revasculising coronary artery surgery can do much to improve the prognosis," said Isabelle Johansson, doctoral student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

The risk of death within eight years of heart failure onset was much higher if the patient also had Type 2 diabetes, with those who also had CAD showing the worst prognosis.

However, the prognosis for long-term survival was better for the patients who had undergone coronary artery surgery before developing heart failure, an observation that held even when controlling for factors such as old age or other diseases, which might have affected the decision to perform revasculising surgery, the researchers explained.

"A decision must be taken as to whether this is possible should be made without delay for all patients with combined Type 2 diabetes and heart failure," Johansson added.

In India, experts said that the rise in Type 2 diabetes patients not only has led to an increase in obesity and heart diseases, but results in defective sperm DNA as well.

For the study, the team studied data of over 35,000 heart failure patients, over a quarter of whom had Type 2 diabetes.

The research has been published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.

(With IANS inputs)