Heart Failure in the Diabetic Patient Population

Cardiologists have long recognized that individuals with diabetes are at high-risk of developing myocardial infarction. In this video, Deepak Bhatt, MD, MPH, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, explains that recent studies indicate that heart failure is as least as important an endpoint as myocardial infarction in people with diabetes.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

There’s been a real revolution in our understanding of cardiovascular risk in patients with diabetes. For many years, as cardiologists, I’d say, perhaps, also, endocrinologists and as trialists, we focus on myocardial infarction as the key endpoint in cardiovascular outcome trials of diabetic patients. What has become clear now through the years with, perhaps, the first real signal of this coming out of SAVOR-TIMI 53 is that heart failure is as least as important an endpoint as myocardial infarction in people with diabetes. In fact, there’s heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, asymptomatic patients who have elevated BNP, for example, who are at risk for developing heart failure. A lot of evident heart failure, if you look for it clinically and if you look for it biochemically, an even greater amount, not that I’m suggesting just doing that outside of research purposes. But still, lots of heart failure in the diabetic patient population.

What this has spawned now is a whole series of trials seeing if different drugs approved and indicated for diabetes can also reduce heart failure risk in people with diabetes. For that matter, there are even some trials seeing if these types of drugs can reduce heart failure in people without diabetes. I think it’s a really great intersection of the diabetes world and the cardiology world that should lead to greatly improved care in patients with diabetes.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/clinical-connection/cardio-endo/76788