, suggests an analysis of the CREDENCE trial.
The research, published online in the journal Circulation, also revealed that patients treated with the sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitor canagliflozin (Invokana, Invokamet) had lower levels of the biomarkers after 1 year compared with those given placebo.
Examination of biomarker levels in more than 2,600 patients from CREDENCE showed that high baseline concentrations of the individual biomarkers were able to predict the future risk for a composite endpoint of renal and heart outcomes.
The combination of all four biomarkers into a single panel revealed that patients with the highest levels were more than four times as likely to experience the composite endpoint than were those with the lowest levels.
As two of the biomarkers used in the study have yet to have established prognostic thresholds, the results remain exploratory.
Lead author James L. Januzzi, MD, director of the Heart Failure and Biomarker Trials at the Baim Institute for Clinical Research, Boston, said that further study will help refine the predictive value of the panel.
“Given that the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology and the American Diabetes Association now all recommend measurement of biomarkers to enhance the ability to predict risk in persons with type 2 diabetes, these results may considerably extend the reach of biomarker-based testing, refining accuracy even further,” he said in a press release.
In an interview, Dr. Januzzi said that “three out of the four biomarkers are already clinically and commercially available,” while the fourth, for insulin-like growth factor binding protein 7 (IGFBP7), is “on the near horizon.”
He stressed that the “future for multiple biomarker testing, however, will be less about ordering each individual test, and ultimately will revolve around panels of blood work that are ordered as a single test.”
Dr. Januzzi added that “rather than using the rather primitive approach that we took” of looking at the individual biomarkers in adjusted models, the next stage “will be to utilize algorithms to combine the results into a single value.
“A clinician will not have to struggle with looking at individual results but will just receive one aggregated test result that informs them whether a patient is at low, medium or higher risk,” he explained.
However, this will require determining the relative importance of each biomarker and weighting them in the final model.
Consequently, the current results “set the foundation for identifying some very powerful individual tests that may ultimately, in aggregate, help us to help our patients with diabetes avoid a major complication,” Dr. Januzzi said.
By revealing that some individuals with both type 2 diabetes and kidney disease are at higher risk than others, he also hopes the findings can be leveraged to treat patients with “varying degrees of intensity with proven therapies, including weight loss, dietary adjustment, and pharmacologic intervention.”
Dr. Januzzi added: “Diabetes affects a dramatic, and growing, percentage of our population, and this type of personalized strategy to reduce the major complications of this rather common disease is an important step forward.”
The authors noted that there is a “bidirectional relationship” between cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease (CKD), such that either diagnosis may increase the risk of, or exacerbate, the other.
Individuals with type 2 diabetes and CKD albuminuria, they added, are at particularly high risk for major cardiovascular events, and studies have shown that several circulating cardiorenal stress biomarkers may predict the onset and progression of CKD in type 2 diabetes, as well as predict cardiovascular events.