MedWire News: Levels of glycated hemoglobin (HbA_1c) offer a good indication of the lipid profile of patients with Type 2 diabetes, study results suggest.

"There were no significant interactions between sex or age and HbA_1c with respect to lipid profile, suggesting the validity of HbA_1c for predicting dyslipidemia irrespective of patients' gender and age," says Haseeb Ahmad Khan, from King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Writing in the journal Acta Diabetologia, Khan reports the findings from a study of 2220 patients with Type 2 diabetes. The patients were aged between 35 and 91 years and 1072 were women.

Overall, 13.5% of the patients had good glycemic control (HbA_1c <7%), 51.8% had moderate glycemic control (HbA_1c 7-9%), and 34.7% had poor glycemic control (HbA_1c >9%).

Dyslipidemia worsened with deteriorating glycemic control, most notably for triglyceride levels, which rose from 1.66 mmol/l (145.6 mg/dl) to 1.88 mmol/l (164.9 mg/dl) and then 2.13 mmol/l (186.8 mg/dl) in patients with good, moderate, and poor glycemic control, respectively.

The percentage of HbA_1c correlated significantly and positively with levels of total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and triglycerides, with these explaining 11.5%, 8.3%, and 16.6% of the variation in HbA_1c, respectively.

The percentage of HbA_1c also correlated negatively with high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol level, with the latter explaining 7.4% of the variation in the former.

"Early therapeutic interventions, aiming to reduce triglycerides and LDL and to increase HDL, significantly reduce cardiovascular events and mortality in patients with Type 2 diabetes," says Khan.

He observes that the "dual biomarker capacity of HbA_1c (glycemic control as well as lipid profile indicator) may be utilized for screening high-risk diabetic patients for timely intervention with lipid-lowering drugs."

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