Type 2 diabetes and incidence of cardiovascular diseases: a cohort study in 1·9 million people

The contemporary associations of type 2 diabetes with a wide range of incident cardiovascular diseases have not been compared. We aimed to study associations between type 2 diabetes and 12 initial manifestations of cardiovascular disease.

We used linked primary care, hospital admission, disease registry, and death certificate records from the CALIBER programme, which links data for people in England recorded in four electronic health data sources. We included people who were (or turned) 30 years or older between Jan 1, 1998, to March 25, 2010, who were free from cardiovascular disease at baseline. The primary endpoint was the first record of one of 12 cardiovascular presentations in any of the data sources. We compared cumulative incidence curves for the initial presentation of cardiovascular disease and used Cox models to estimate cause-specific hazard ratios (HRs). This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT01804439).