Dr Muthiah Vaduganathan, Cardiologist and investigator at Brigham Women's hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, explains the valuable insights from his community-based cohort study on the application of a newly developed biomarker-based heart failure risk score in cohort of nearly 7,000 individuals with dysglycaemia and without Manifest Cardiovascular Disease.
Diabetes and prediabetes are a growing concern worldwide. While having a major global impact on patients and healthcare systems, their association with Heart Failure (HF) is not well phenotyped.
The study aimed to leverage a combination of existing markers to forecast HF risk at 5- and 10-years in US populations with diabetes and prediabetes. These tools included N-terminal proBNP, high sensitivity Troponin, High sensitivity CRP and a standard 12-lead ECG.
The research provides compelling evidence that these biomarker measurements can be utilized in clinically stable patients with prediabetes to offer incremental clinical utility in forecasting heart failure risk. Furthermore, deployment of this risk score may allow for the efficient allocation of risk reduction tools such as SGLT2 inhibitors amongst at-risk individuals.
Consequently, Dr Vaduganathan advocates an integrated approach across multiple societies (e.g. cardiology, endocrinology, and the broad medical society) clearly defining evidence-based strategies to identify risk in the diabetes population and standardizing recommendations.