HbA1c, Fasting Plasma Glucose Predictive of Alzheimer’s in T2D

HealthDay News — For patients with type 2 diabetes, fasting plasma glucose (FPG) visit-to-visit variation, represented by the coefficient of variation (CV), and HbA1c CV are independently associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published online in Diabetes Care.

Tsai-Chung Li, PhD, from China Medical University in Taiwan, and colleagues included 16,706 patients with T2DM in the National Diabetes Care Management Program who were age 60 years or more and without diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors sought to examine the correlation between glycemic variability and incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers identified 831 incident cases of Alzheimer’s disease during a median follow-up of 8.88 years, with a crude incidence rate of 3.5/1000 person-years. Both FPG CV and HbA1c CV were significant predictors of Alzheimer’s disease after adjustment for sociodemographic factors, lifestyle behaviors, diabetes-related variables, FPG and HbA1c, drug-related variables, and comorbidities, with hazard ratios of 1.27 and 1.32 for the third tertiles of FPG CV and HbA1c CV, respectively.

“The associations between glycemic variability and [Alzheimer’s disease] demonstrated in this study suggest a linked pathophysiological mechanism, which is worthy of further investigation,” the authors write.

Reference

Li T-C, Yang C-P, Li C-I, et al. Visit-to-visit variations in fasting plasma glucose and HbA1c associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer disease: Taiwan diabetes study [published online July 2017]. Diabetes Care. doi:10.2337/dc16-2238