Age at diagnosis of type 2 diabetes mellitus and associations with cardiovascular and mortality risks findings from the Swedish National Diabetes Registry

Background: Risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and mortality for patients with versus without type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) appears to vary by the age at T2DM diagnosis, but few population studies have analyzed mortality and CVD outcomes associations across the full age range. Methods: With use of the Swedish National Diabetes Registry, everyone with T2DM registered in the Registry between 1998 and 2012 was included. Controls were randomly selected from the general population matched for age, sex, and county. The analysis cohort comprised 318083 patients with T2DM matched with just <1.6 million controls. Participants were followed from 1998 to 2013 for CVD outcomes and to 2014 for mortality. Outcomes of interest were total mortality, cardiovascular mortality, noncardiovascular mortality, coronary heart disease, acute myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. We also examined life expectancy by age at diagnosis. We conducted the primary analyses using Cox proportional hazards models in those with no previous CVD and repeated the work in the entire cohort. Results: Over a median follow-up period of 5.63 years, patients with T2DM diagnosed at ≤40 years had the highest excess risk for most outcomes relative to controls with adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) of 2.05 (1.81–2.33) for total mortality, 2.72 (2.13–3.48) for cardiovascularrelated mortality, 1.95 (1.68–2.25) for noncardiovascular mortality, 4.77 (3.86–5.89) for heart failure, and 4.33 (3.82–4.91) for coronary heart disease. All risks attenuated progressively with each increasing decade at diagnostic age; by the time T2DM was diagnosed at >80 years, the adjusted hazard ratios for CVD and non-CVD mortality were <1, with excess risks for other CVD outcomes substantially attenuated. Moreover, survival in those diagnosed beyond 80 was the same as controls, whereas it was more than a decade less when T2DM was diagnosed in adolescence. Finally, hazard ratios for most outcomes were numerically greater in younger women with T2DM. Conclusions: Age at diagnosis of T2DM is prognostically important for survival and cardiovascular risks, with implications for determining the timing and intensity of risk factor interventions for clinical decision making and for guideline-directed care. These observations amplify support for preventing/delaying T2DM onset in younger individuals

A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text

Background: The automated extraction of gene and/or protein interactions from the literature is one of the most important targets of biomedical text mining research. In this paper we present a realistic evaluation of gene/protein interaction mining relevant to potential non-specialist users. Hence we have specifically avoided methods that are complex to install or require reimplementation, and we coupled our chosen extraction methods with a state-of-the-art biomedical named entity tagger. Results: Our results show: that performance across different evaluation corpora is extremely variable; that the use of tagged (as opposed to gold standard) gene and protein names has a significant impact on performance, with a drop in F-score of over 20 percentage points being commonplace; and that a simple keyword-based benchmark algorithm when coupled with a named entity tagger outperforms two of the tools most widely used to extract gene/protein interactions. Conclusion: In terms of availability, ease of use and performance, the potential non-specialist user community interested in automatically extracting gene and/or protein interactions from free text is poorly served by current tools and systems. The public release of extraction tools that are easy to install and use, and that achieve state-of-art levels of performance should be treated as a high priority by the biomedical text mining community

Range of risk factor levels: control, mortality and cardiovascular outcomes in type 1 diabetes mellitus

Background—Individuals with type 1 diabetes have high risk of cardiovascular complications, but it is unknown to what extent fulfilling all cardiovascular treatment goals is associated with residual risk of mortality and cardiovascular outcomes in type 1 diabetes compared with the general population. Methods—We included all patients with type 1 diabetes aged >=18 years registered in the Swedish National Diabetes Register from January 1, 1998 - December 31, 2014, in all 33,333 patients, each matched for age and sex with 5 controls without diabetes randomly selected from the population. Patients with type 1 diabetes were categorized according to number of risk factors not at target: glycated hemoglobin, blood pressure, albuminuria, smoking and LDL cholesterol. Risk of all-cause mortality, acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure hospitalization (HF) and stroke was examined in relation to the number of risk factors at target.Results—The mean follow-up was 10.4 years in the diabetes group. Overall, 2074 of 33,333 patients with diabetes and 4141 of 166,529 controls died. Risk for all outcomes increased stepwise for each additional risk factor not at target. Adjusted hazard ratios (HR) for patients achieving all risk factor targets compared with controls were 1.31 (95% CI 0.93-1.85) for all-cause mortality; 1.82 (95% CI 1.15-2.88) for AMI; 1.97 (95% CI 1.04-3.73) for HF; and 1.17 (95% CI 0.51-2.68) for stroke. HR for patients versus controls with none of the risk factors meeting target was 7.33 (95% CI 5.08-10.57) for all-cause mortality; 12.34 (95% CI 7.91-19.48) for AMI: 15.09 (95% CI 9.87-23.09) for HF; and 12.02 (95% CI 7.66-18.85) for stroke.Conclusions—A steep graded association exists between decreasing number of CV risk factors at target and major adverse CV outcomes among patients with T1DM. However, risks for all outcomes were numerically higher for T1DM patients compared with controls, even when all risk factors were at target, with risk for AMI and HF statistically significantly so

Risk factors, mortality, and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes

Background: Patients with diabetes are at higher risk for death and cardiovascular outcomes than the general population. We investigated whether the excess risk of death and cardiovascular events among patients with type 2 diabetes could be reduced or eliminated. Methods: In a cohort study, we included 271,174 patients with type 2 diabetes who were registered in the Swedish National Diabetes Register and matched them with 1,355,870 controls on the basis of age, sex, and county. We assessed patients with diabetes according to age categories and according to the presence of five risk factors (elevated glycated hemoglobin level, elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level, albuminuria, smoking, and elevated blood pressure). Cox regression was used to study the excess risk of outcomes (death, acute myocardial infarction, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure) associated with smoking and the number of variables outside target ranges. We also examined the relationship between various risk factors and cardiovascular outcomes. Results: The median follow-up among all the study participants was 5.7 years, during which 175,345 deaths occurred. Among patients with type 2 diabetes, the excess risk of outcomes decreased stepwise for each risk-factor variable within the target range. Among patients with diabetes who had all five variables within target ranges, the hazard ratio for death from any cause, as compared with controls, was 1.06 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.00 to 1.12), the hazard ratio for acute myocardial infarction was 0.84 (95% CI, 0.75 to 0.93), and the hazard ratio for stroke was 0.95 (95% CI, 0.84 to 1.07). The risk of hospitalization for heart failure was consistently higher among patients with diabetes than among controls (hazard ratio, 1.45; 95% CI, 1.34 to 1.57). In patients with type 2 diabetes, a glycated hemoglobin level outside the target range was the strongest predictor of stroke and acute myocardial infarction; smoking was the strongest predictor of death. Conclusions: Patients with type 2 diabetes who had five risk-factor variables within the target ranges appeared to have little or no excess risk of death, myocardial infarction, or stroke, as compared with the general population. (Funded by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions and others.)

Status and trends of European pollinators. Key findings of the STEP project

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