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Individuals with autoimmune disorders are at significantly higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease than individuals who do not have autoimmune disorders. This was revealed on Saturday from a large-scale population survey led by KU Leuven. The additional risk particularly affects younger patients.
Bron: BELGIAN
About ten percent of the population in affluent regions such as Europe and the United States has one or more autoimmune diseases. Examples of such autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system regards the body’s own cells and substances as foreign, are rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, systemic sclerosis and type 1 diabetes. Previous research has shown that some of these conditions are associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, but these studies were too small to draw firm conclusions about the need for cardiovascular disease prevention in patients with autoimmune diseases.
That is why an international research team has started a large-scale investigation. The scientists looked for possible links between 19 of the most common autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular disease. They used anonymized data from the UK’s Clinical Practice Research Datalink, which accounts for 22 million patient records or about a fifth of the current UK population.
Risk increases
The results showed that the risk of developing cardiovascular disease was on average 1.56 times greater in patients with autoimmune diseases than in patients without. The risk also increases with the number of different autoimmune diseases in patients. Systemic sclerosis, Addison’s disease, lupus, and type 1 diabetes are among the highest-risk conditions.
The research results will be presented this weekend at the annual conference of the European Society of Cardiology and published in the scientific journal The Lancet.