Angiographic severity and morphological presentation of coronary artery disease in NIDDM patients compared with matched nondiabetic subjects in a north Indian cohort

Diabetes is considered as a coronary artery disease (CAD) riskequivalent and diabetics are prone to a more severe and diffuse atherosclerotic CAD. In this study, we evaluated a north Indian cohort of type II diabetics for their angiographic and morphological features and compared them with a similar nondiabetic subgroup. The study included 100 consecutive non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) patients undergoing clinically indicated elective coronary angiography and 100 nondiabetic patients who were individually matched for sex, age, and clinical diagnosis. On analysis, we found that the frequency of single and multivessel CAD were statistically different between the two groups with single vessel disease (SVD) being more frequent in nondiabetic CAD patients (10 vs 26, p<0.05) and multivessel disease (MVD) being more common in diabetics (82 and 54, p<0.05), not only the incidence of MVD, but also the incidence of significant left main disease and left main coronary artery (LMCA) disease with associated MVD were more common in diabetics (22 vs 6, p<0.05) as well as the average number of lesions (2.65±0.7, 1.95±0.85, p<0.001) and mean stenosis (63.56±22.9 and 50.64±20.8; p<0.01) even when the patients were matched for age, sex, and clinical diagnosis.