Women's health deteriorate more rapidly than men prior to diabetes

A new study has found that prior to the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2D), women with versus without prediabetes experience significantly have larger adverse differences in their cardiometabolic health than men. However, the mechanisms responsible for these sex differences remain a mystery.

The research, conducted by the Maastricht University Medical Centre, aimed to evaluate sex-related differences in cardiovascular risk factor levels, both before and after the onset of T2D.

T2D is known to reduce or even reverse the protective effect of being female on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The metabolic changes that eventually lead to T2D can precede the development of hyperglycemia (caused by poorly controlled blood glucose levels) by years or even decades. Despite this, there has been a little investigation into whether women suffer a relatively worse cardiometabolic risk profile before developing the disease.

The authors analysed a population-based cohort of individuals aged 40-75 years, containing an elevated number of people with T2D to investigate differences in the levels of cardiovascular risk factors between prediabetes and T2D on the one hand and normal glucose metabolism on the other.

Analyses were performed which adjusted for the age and sex of subjects, and, where appropriate, their medication use, to determine whether this difference was dissimilar in men and women.
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