medwireNews: Findings from a meta-analysis presented at the virtual 56th EASD Annual Meeting suggest that patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have a significantly elevated risk for developing diabetes.
As reported in a poster presentation, Zixing Tian and colleagues from the University of Manchester in the UK analyzed data from seven studies investigating the relationship between RA and incident diabetes. Six were population-based studies and one was conducted in a hospital, and the studies comprised a total of 1,629,854 participants.
Overall, people with RA had a significant 23% increased risk for incident diabetes relative to those without, and this result remained consistent in a sensitivity analysis excluding the hospital-based study. Tian and team caution that there was “potential publication bias” as demonstrated by Egger’s test.
“This finding supports the notion that inflammatory pathways are involved in the pathogenesis of diabetes,” said Tian and colleagues.
“We suggest that more intensive screening and management of [diabetes] risk factors should be considered in people with RA.”
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