Diabetes Increases Risk of Kidney Failure

Tue, 22 Jun 2010
Diabetes is known to increase an individual's risk of kidney failure as well as loss of vision.

However, a new study suggests another possibly negative outcome of this disease.

It suggests that newly diagnosed diabetics have an increased risk of developing serious liver disease, like liver failure and cirrhosis.

The authors noted that medical guidelines do not call for doctors to screen for liver-related complications of diabetes, stating that this makes the liver a possibly neglected target organ.

The study states that newly diagnosed diabetics appear to have a 77 per cent greater risk of developing a serious liver condition than those who do not have diabetes .

This study was carried out by scientists at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital.

The researchers used Ontario's huge database of medical claims to investigate whether or not developing diabetes heightens an individual's risk of going on to develop liver disease.

They explored the anonymous files of nearly 2.5 million people aged 30 to 75 over a period from April 1, 1994 to March 31, 2006.

The researchers compared liver disease rates of almost 440,000 people who were diagnosed with diabetes during that period with two million people who were not diabetic .

Over an average of 6.4 years from diagnosis, the researchers discovered that 2,463 of the diabetics and 5,902 of non-diabetics were diagnosed with liver disease.

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