Diabetes linked to Irregular Heartbeat

A new study indicates that diabetes is linked to a 40 per cent greater risk of developing atrial fibrillation— the most common kind of chronically irregular heartbeat.

Dr. Sascha Dublin, lead researcher, Group Health Research Institute says that researchers found that this risk rises even higher for people who have had diabetes and less controlled blood sugar.

For three years, researchers tracked more than 1,400 Group Health patients who had newly recognized atrial fibrillation.

“When a patient with diabetes has symptoms like heart palpitations, clinicians should have a higher level of suspicion that the reason could be atrial fibrillation. This heart rhythm disturbance is important to diagnose, because it can be treated with medications like warfarin that can prevent many strokes that atrial fibrillation would otherwise cause,” said Dublin.

Dublin claimed that her study was one of the first to examine the relationship between atrial fibrillation and duration of patients’ diabetes and blood sugar levels. Unlike most prior studies, this one adjusted for patients’ weight, which is important because both diabetes and atrial fibrillation are more common in heavier people.

It is hard to establish which comes first—diabetes or atrial fibrillation—with this kind of case-control study, unlike a randomized trial, said Dublin. “But our finding that the risk of atrial fibrillation is higher with longer time since patients started medications for diabetes, and with higher blood glucose levels, is strongly suggestive that diabetes can cause atrial fibrillation,” added Dublin.

Researchers found that patients with diabetes were 40 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation than people without diabetes.

The risk of atrial fibrillation rose by 3 per cent for each additional year that patients had diabetes. For patients with high blood sugar (glycosylated hemoglobin, also known as HBA1c more than 9 per cent), atrial fibrillation risk was twice that for people without diabetes. But patients with well-controlled diabetes (HBA1c 7 per cent or less) were equally likely to have atrial fibrillation compared to people without diabetes.

‘The Journal of General Internal Medicine’ published the study.