For people with type 2 diabetes, leading a healthy lifestyle and scoring high on the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) measure may lead to reduced risks of developing macrovascular and microvascular diseases , as a study shows.
Using data from the UK Biobank, researchers looked at 13,543 participants with type 2 diabetes who initially did not have macrovascular or microvascular diseases. Healthy lifestyle was assessed based on body mass index (BMI), smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, sleep duration and diet. Life’s Essential 8 scores (0 to 100) were generated from eight measures, including four health behaviors (diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, and sleep health) and four health factors (BMI, lipids blood glucose and blood pressure) to assess cardiovascular health.
Over a median follow-up of 12.1 years, 3,279 (24.2%) participants had incident macrovascular disease and 2,557 (18.9%) had microvascular disease. Cox proportional hazards models showed that participants with ideal or poor lifestyles had significantly lower risks of macrovascular disease (hazard ratio (HR), 0.46, 95 confidence interval (CI) for cent, 0.36 to 0.59) and microvascular disease (HR, 0.60, 95 percent CI, 0.47 to 0.77).
Similarly, participants in the high versus low cardiovascular health group (Life’s Essential 8 scores: 80-100 vs. 0-49) had a significantly low risk of macrovascular disease (HR, 0.20, 95% CI, 0. 05-0.79) and microvascular disease (HR, 0.24, 95 percent CI, 0.06 to 0.98).
Further analysis indicated that following an ideal lifestyle could prevent 37.0 percent of macrovascular diseases and 24.7 percent of microvascular diseases, while achieving high cardiovascular health could prevent 71.9 percent of percent of macrovascular diseases and 67.5 percent of microvascular diseases.
