Diabetes – Risk Factors For Heart Disease

Transcript

Diabetics have a number of risk factors that go along with the diabetic state. They are: kidney damage, high blood pressure, and abnormal fats in the blood. Kidney damage is very common in diabetics and that complicates the situation when patients have a heart attack and also makes patients more likely to have a heart attack. The same thing is true about the fats in the blood. Diabetics have high triglyceride fats (which are bad) and low HDL fats (which are good.) So that increases the risk for arthrosclerosis and it increases the likelihood of a patient developing hardening of the arteries and a heart attack. Finally, when there is damage to the kidney, often that engenders high blood pressure. So the damaged kidney is bad in two ways: both because it makes the heart attack issue more complicated and also because it increases the likelihood of a heart attack and, by the way, also a stroke.