THURSDAY, Mar. 12 (HealthDay News) -- In non-diabetic patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), high blood glucose at hospital admission is independently associated with an increased risk of short- and mid-term death, according to a report published in the Mar. 1 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.
Christoph K. Naber, M.D., Ph.D., of the Klinik fur Kardiologie und Angiologie in Essen, Germany, and colleagues compared outcomes in 5,866 patients who were categorized into tertiles based on admission blood glucose.
Compared to patients with blood glucose below 120 mg/dL, the researchers found that those with blood glucose above 150 mg/dL had a significantly increased risk of in-hospital death or major adverse cardiac clinical events (adjusted odds ratios, 2.86 and 1.88, respectively). They also found that these increased risks persisted during the year after discharge (adjusted odds ratios, 1.46 and 1.31, respectively).
"Because of the observational nature of our analysis, caution needs to be exerted while attributing causality, and our findings should be regarded as hypothesis generating and explorative," the authors write. "One major limitation of our study was the lack of systematic screening for diabetes mellitus or impaired glucose tolerance in the registry. Thus, it may be possible that we did not precisely exclude all patients with impaired glucose tolerance or mild diabetes mellitus in the hospital or who developed diabetes mellitus during follow-up."
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