medwireNews: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have a lower risk for developing type 2 diabetes relative to individuals without the disease and those with hypertension, osteoarthritis (OA), or psoriatic arthritis (PsA), US researchers report.
“While systemic inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, our findings unexpectedly show that having rheumatoid arthritis itself does not confer an increased risk of type 2 diabetes,” said researcher Seoyoung Kim (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts) in a press release.
In their analysis of a commercial insurance database, the investigators found that 1.93% of 108,568 patients with RA developed incident type 2 diabetes during a median of 1.8 years of follow-up, as did 1.68% of the same number of matched individuals from the general population without RA during a median of 1.5 years. These findings translated into a significant 28% lower risk for diabetes among people with RA after adjustment for potentially confounding factors.
Patients with RA also had a significant 35% lower risk for type 2 diabetes than those with hypertension in the adjusted analysis, as well as a significant 25% reduced risk compared with individuals with OA, and a significant 24% reduced risk relative to PsA patients.
The study findings are published in Arthritis Care & Research.
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