Diabetes, kidney woes can lead to heart disease after decades

Men with both diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart health problems 28 years earlier than those without either condition, researchers reported Monday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. Photo by MART PRODUCTION, Pexels

People with both type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease face a heart health double-whammy, a new study says.

Women with diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart problems 26 years earlier, results show.

“Our findings help to interpret the combination of risk factors that will lead to a high predicted cardiovascular disease risk and at what age they have an impact on risk,” lead study author Vaishnavi Krishnan, a researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago and a medical student at Boston University School of Medicine, said in a news release.

“For example, if someone has borderline-elevated levels of blood pressure, glucose and/or impaired kidney function, but they don’t yet have hypertension or diabetes or chronic kidney disease, their risk may not be recognized,” Krishan said.

For the study, researchers used federal health survey data from 2011 to 2020 to create heart risk profiles for people who have type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, or both.

Kidney disease and type 2 diabetes are two of the four components of cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome, which the heart association defines as the overall health risk that arises from the interplay of heart disease, kidney problems, diabetes and obesity.

Results show that adults with chronic kidney disease develop higher risk of heart disease eight years earlier than those with healthy kidneys.

Likewise, people with type 2 diabetes have elevated heart disease risk about a decade sooner than those without diabetes.

But when combined, the two conditions appear to work together to drive heart health risk even higher, researchers found.

Adults with both type 2 diabetes and kidney disease have a higher heart risk starting at age 42 for women and 35 for men. That’s 26 and 28 years earlier, respectively, compared to people without the two health problems, researchers found.

However, researchers warned that their findings are based on a simulated population.

“This is an early step in the process of understanding how a risk model works,” researcher Dr. Sadiya Khan said in a news release. Khan is a professor of cardiovascular epidemiology and an associate professor of cardiology, medical social sciences and preventive medicine at Northwestern School of Medicine.

Because theses findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American Heart Association has more on cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome.