(Ivanhoe Newswire) – Alcohol has become a concerning cause of death among type 1 diabetes patients since the 1980s, according to this study.
The study also shows that, while survival of patients with early onset type 1 diabetes (age 0-14 years) has improved with time, survival of patients with late onset type 1 diabetes (age 15-29 years) has deteriorated since the 1980s.

Despite great advances in diabetes care, type 1 diabetes is still associated with premature mortality due to both acute and chronic complications. It is thought that people with late onset diabetes have better long term survival than people with early onset type 1 diabetes, but few studies have compared trends in mortality between early and late onset patients.

So researchers in Finland investigated short and long term time trends in mortality in 17,306 patients diagnosed as having type 1 diabetes below 30 years of age between 1970 and 1999. They also studied the causes of death over time. Participants were followed up for an average of 21 years.

Encouragingly, the researchers found that survival in the early onset group improved from 1970 to 2007. This was explained by a fall in chronic complications of diabetes during the first 20 years of diabetes.

However, this was overshadowed by an increasing trend in both short and long term mortality in the late onset group, due to a rise in alcohol and drug related mortality and acute complications of diabetes.

Alarmingly, mortality due to alcohol and drug related causes accounted for 39% of deaths during the first 20 years of diabetes in this group, say the authors.

"This highlights the importance of permanent and long lasting doctor-patient relationships, close supervision, and guidance on the short term and long term effects of alcohol in young people with type 1 diabetes, especially in our alcohol permissive cultures," the authors were quoted as saying.

SOURCE: BMJ, published online September 8, 2011



Reported September 13, 2011
Gene Discovery Helps Prevent Heart Disease and Stroke ++UK news
(Ivanhoe Newswire) – The discovery of a blood pressure gene offers new potential therapeutic targets for prevention of heart disease and stroke- the biggest cause of death worldwide.

Research co-led by scientists from Queen Mary, University of London has discovered 16 new gene regions that influence blood pressure.

Toby Johnson, Patricia Munroe and Mark Caulfield from Barts and The London Medical School co-led, with US and European colleagues, an international collaborative study. This study analyzed data on over 270,000 people to find genetic variations in the DNA of each person that were associated with higher or lower blood pressure. This enabled them to identify 16 new gene regions influencing blood pressure and provided confirmation of 12 other gene regions that had previously been discovered by the Barts and The London team.

The researchers then combined the effects of genetic variation in all 28 gene regions and showed that they impact the risk of developing hypertension, stroke, coronary heart disease, and structural changes in the heart. The combined effect of these variations on blood pressure is similar to the effect of a standard blood pressure lowering medicine. Importantly, they showed that genetic effects on blood pressure are broadly similar in people of European, East Asian, South Asian, and African ancestries.

Blood pressure is influenced by a combination of lifestyle factors and genes which until now have proved challenging to identify. Even small changes in blood pressure can increase risk of stroke and heart attack and over one billion people worldwide have high blood pressure – hypertension.

"High blood pressure affects a quarter of the adult population in the UK. These new gene regions we report today offer a major leap forward in our understanding of the inherited influences on blood pressure and offer new potential avenues for treatment which is particularly welcome for those who do not achieve optimal blood pressure control," Professor Mark Caulfield, who is also President of the British Hypertension Society, was quoted as saying.

SOURCE: Nature, published online September 9, 2011