After receiving a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, your risk of experiencing additional health conditions in the years that follow may depend on whether you’re male or female.
“Our research revealed not just which complications show up, but how this wasn’t the same story for men and women,” says lead author Fabiola Eto, PhD, post doctoral research associate with the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London. “Knowing roughly when a complication is likely to happen — and for whom — could provide insights into preventing it.”
Study Revealed Differences and Some Similarities Between Men and Women
In the analysis, published in the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Eto and her team used medical records to follow nearly 29,000 adults with type 2 diabetes for up to 10 years. Subjects averaged in age from 54 to 56 at diabetes onset.
The investigators discovered that about 2 out of 5 individuals diagnosed between 2010 and 2020 had at least one significant new health complication within about seven years.
The research discovered that, for both men and women, hypertension (high blood pressure) was the most frequent condition to be diagnosed following type 2 diabetes onset.
But the findings also highlighted a few differences between men and women’s trajectories after a type 2 diabetes diagnosis:
- Men were more likely than women to be diagnosed with high blood pressure (21.1 percent versus 20.2 percent)
- Men were more likely than women to be diagnosed with cardiovascular disease and end-stage renal disease (8.4 percent versus 5.3 percent).
- Women were more likely than men to be diagnosed with mental health conditions (8.1 percent versus 5.3 percent).
Ajay Rao, MD, chief of endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at Temple Health in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research, calls these differences “clinically meaningful.”
Read the full article here
