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FRIDAY, June 30 (HealthDay News) -- People with type 2 diabetes can expect to suffer from fatal and non-fatal heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events about 15 years earlier than non-diabetics, a new study shows.
"The rates are consistently higher," said lead researcher Dr. Gillian Booth, an adjunct scientist at the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Canada.
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Her team published its findings in the July 1 issue of The Lancet.
It's long been known that type 2 diabetes increases the risk for cardiovascular disease. In the study, Booth's team studied the hospital and death records of nearly 9.5 million Canadians -- 379,000 of them with diabetes. They hoped to determine how fast diabetes accelerates an individual's progression to higher levels of risk for cardiovascular disease.
The study found that men with type 2 diabetes entered the cardiovascular "moderate-risk" category at an average age of just under 39 years; for non-diabetic men, that transition didn't typically occur until more than 15 years later, at about age 55. Diabetic men entered the "high-risk" category at just over 49 years of age, compared to 62 years for men without diabetes, the researchers found.
The numbers for women were similar. Women with type 2 diabetes were classified as being at moderate risk for heart disease at an average age of 46, compared to 62 years for non-diabetic women. And women with type 2 diabetes entered the high-risk category at 56 years, compared to just under 69 years of age for women without diabetes.
Perhaps the most striking numbers in the report involved life expectancy. People with type 2 diabetes who were also classified as being at moderate or high risk for cardiovascular disease died an average of about 18 years earlier than non-diabetics, the researchers found.
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