Seite wählen

The autumn conference of the DDG, the German Diabetes Society, will take place online this year due to the corona pandemic. This year’s conference president Ralf Lobmann, who also holds the directorate of the Clinic for Endocrinology, Diabetology and Geriatrics at the Klinikum Stuttgart, warns of cardiovascular risk factors due to diabetes. The greatest danger for people with fluctuating blood glucose levels is heart failure, which can occur as a result of diabetes mellitus. The expert and also other specialists such as the DDG expert Nikolaus Marx from the Department of Cardiology, Angiology and Internal Intensive Care Medicine at the University Hospital of the RWTH Aachen University point out that the risk of cardiovascular disease can be two to four times higher. Women have an even higher risk. Their risk is six times higher. In addition, cardiac insufficiency often goes undetected and can lead to complicated late effects, even resulting in death. Conversely, patients with diagnosed heart failure have undetected diabetes in 25 to even 40 percent of cases. Both diseases must therefore not be considered independently of each other. The exact triggers and mechanisms behind them are still partly unknown. Changes in the metabolism of the heart muscle in relation to calcium and energy metabolism are suspected, as well as the increased blood sugar level itself and, according to recent findings, (immune) messenger substances from the fatty tissue and the liver. This is often damaged in diabetics because of overweight and fat deposits. The DDG experts, therefore, advise special attention to be paid to this patient group. Diagnosis and therapy must be improved so that individualized treatments can be more targeted against diabetes in combination with heart failure. DDG points out that the basis for this is the theory of disease processes and functional disorders of the organs involved (pathophysiology).

Source: aerzteblatt.de