Silent heart disease common in diabetics

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A sizable minority of diabetic patients who have an impaired pumping ability of their heart do not have any symptoms, new research suggests.

As lead investigator Dr. Panithaya Chareonthaitawee, told Reuters Health, one in every six diabetic patients who were assessed with SPECT, a nuclear imaging test, showed a drop in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which simply means the heart is pumping abnormally low amounts of blood with each beat.

National guidelines, Chareonthaitawee added, indicate that "patients who have reduced LVEF but not symptoms" can benefit from commonly used blood pressure drugs called ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers. In addition, the guidelines recommend that patients stop smoking and lose weight.

As reported in the American Heart Journal, Chareonthaitawee and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, examined records of 1,046 diabetic patients with no heart disease symptoms and found that 16.7 percent had reduced LVEFs.

Moreover, the presence of reduced LVEF was associated with a reduced survival rate at 10 years -- 29 percent versus 57 percent in patients with a normal LVEF.

Because heart failure can be treated and outcomes improved, there is a potential role for screening patients who are in the asymptomatic stages of reduced LVEF, continued Chareonthaitawee.

Still, he emphasized that these findings are preliminary and will need to be confirmed in larger studies.

SOURCE: American Heart Journal, September 2007.