Older people with diabetes are much more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than their non-diabetic peers, according to a study published in the international open-access medical journal PLoS Medicine.

Joshua Barzilay of Emory University reports the researchers studied a randomly selected group of nearly 6,000 individuals over ager 65, of whom about 9% were known to have diabetes and were using oral drugs or insulin injections to control their blood sugar.

During the average of 11 years that they followed the participants, over 40% of the individuals died, and approximately 50-60% of the deaths were attributable to cardiovascular causes.

After adjusting for many factors known to affect cardiovascular disease risk such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and cholesterol levels, participants with diabetes were found to be twice as likely to die from cardiovascular disease as those without diabetes. The risk was particularly high for patients treated with insulin injections.

The finding that older adults with diabetes are at very high absolute risk of death from cardiovascular events makes it clear that strategies aimed at reducing those risks in elderly diabetic patients should be pursued aggressively.