 Diabetes has many complications, but the most life-threatening consequences of it are heart disease and stroke. These diseases strike people with diabetes more than twice as often as they do others. Most of the cardiovascular complications associated to diabetes have to do with the way the heart pumps blood through the body. Diabetes can modify the chemical makeup of some of the substances found in the blood and this can cause blood vessels to get narrow or to clog up entirely. This is called atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, and diabetes seems to speed it up.
Unluckily, the risk of cardiovascular disease among people with diabetes is dramatic: a diagnosis of diabetes as an adult presents the same risk as already having one heart attack. More than 65 percent of deaths in diabetes patients are attributed to heart and vascular disease.
Statistics reports that three out of four people with diabetes die from a heart disease or stroke. At present moment specialists don’t completely understand the causal connection between diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In spite of that fact, it is totally clear that diabetes – especially type 2 diabetes – often goes with a variety of heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high cholesterol, and obesity.
Moreover, diabetes is linked with an enlarged tendency for clots creation. Such complication of diabetes as kidney disease, also significantly increases the risk of heart disease. Studies have discovered a relationship between the earliest stage of kidney disease (microalbuminuria) and heart disease. Additionally, high blood sugar levels lead to glycation (the attachment of glucose to proteins and lipids) and boost the tendency for oxidation.
Some scientists think that oxidized LDL cholesterol provokes the inflammatory damage that causes atherosclerosis, the storage of fatty deposits in artery walls. These fatty deposits change into plaques that thicken artery walls. When the plaques break, immune system cells and platelets (blood cell components that initiate the clotting process) go to the scene. In such a way a blood clot forms, obstructing blood flow.
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