Diabetes prevention and cardiovascular complications

Excerpt

To the Editor: The review by Nathan et al recently published in Diabetologia provides an excellent discussion of the relationship between diabetes prevention and microvascular and cardiovascular (CV) complications [1]. We agree that the existing data are quite limited, although somewhat more robust for microvascular disease. This is not unexpected, given that hyperglycaemia is more closely aligned with retinopathy and nephropathy than with atherosclerotic CV disease (ASCVD). We noted one important omission, however, from this otherwise complete review. Insulin Resistance Intervention after Stroke (IRIS) was a large, multi-national clinical trial, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, that randomised insulin-resistant (but non-diabetic) individuals with recent stroke or transient ischaemic attack to receive the thiazolidinedione pioglitazone or placebo and assessed the impact on future CV events as well as the diagnosis of diabetes [2]. …