MedWire News: Data strongly suggest that high serum uric acid is an independent predictor for the development of Type 2 diabetes, according to the results of a meta-analysis published in the journal Diabetes Care.
Identifying risk factors for the development of Type 2 diabetes is essential for early screening and prevention and previous studies have suggested that serum uric acid may be a risk factor for the disease.
To characterize this association further, Hirohito Sone and colleagues, from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Clinical Medicine in Ibaraki, Japan, conducted a systematic literature search from 1966 to 2009 to identify relevant observational cohort studies.
The studies were required to include Type 2 diabetes as a specified outcome, report baseline assessment of serum uric acid, and include data on relative risk.
The authors stratified the studies into subgroups based on different study characteristics, and performed meta-regression analyses to investigate the effect of these characteristics on the association between serum uric acid levels and risk for Type 2 diabetes.
Eleven cohort studies (42,834 participants) met the inclusion criteria reporting 3305 incident cases of Type 2 diabetes during follow-up periods ranging from 2.0 to 13.5 years.
To quantify the dose–response relationship between baseline serum uric acid level and risk for Type 2 diabetes, the authors calculated the relative risk associated with each 1 mg/dl increase.
They found that each 1 mg/dl rise in serum uric acid resulted in a 17% increase in the risk for Type 2 diabetes. After adjustment for publication bias, the risk decreased to 11% but remained statistically significant.
Sensitivity analyses to explore the effects of study characteristics indicated that adjusting for alcohol intake weakened the association between serum uric acid and Type 2 diabetes risk, whereas adjusting for metabolic variables had no significant effect.
“These findings suggest that there are both noncausal and causal associations between serum uric acid level and the risk of Type 2 diabetes,” write the authors.
“Further research should attempt to investigate whether serum uric acid would be useful for predicting Type 2 diabetes with respect to the prevention of Type 2 diabetes,” they conclude.
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