Metabolic syndrome is not associated with increased mortality or cardiovascular risk in nondiabetic patients with a new diagnosis of coronary artery disease.

Description

The aim of this study was to investigate the association between metabolic syndrome and long-term cardiovascular risk in nondiabetic patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). The analyses were performed on data from patients included in the Duke Database for Cardiovascular Disease with an angiographically documented incident diagnosis of CAD. Results indicated that a majority of patients with incident CAD met the National Cholesterol Education Program-Adult Treatment Panel III clinical criteria for metabolic syndrome. However, metabolic syndrome in the absence of diabetes was not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events in patients with CAD compared to patients with neither diabetes nor metabolic syndrome. In addition, this study supported previous findings that type 2 diabetes increases the risk of death and cardiovascular events in secondary prevention population. As for the analysis of the individual components of metabolic syndrome and prediction of survival, the authors found that the thresholds used to predict risk in primary prevention patients are comparable in a secondary prevention population (when analyses are conducted only in patients with incident CAD).These results highlighted the need to better understand the complex relationship between risk factors and outcomes in secondary prevention population.