CHICAGO – Stroke risk in diabetic women with restless legs syndrome (RLS) is triple that of diabetic men with the sensorimotor disease, Zoe Heis reported at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology.
The mechanism underlying this marked gender discrepancy in risk requires further investigation, as does the highly practical question of whether improved diabetic control can reduce the stroke risk, said Ms. Heis of the Center for Integrative Research on Cardiovascular Aging at Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee.
She presented a retrospective cohort study of 385 patients diagnosed with RLS during 2011-2013 at a community sleep center using the International RLS Study Group criteria. Along with 770 propensity-matched controls, they were followed until mid-2015. At baseline, 40% of the RLS patients had diabetes and 70% had hypertension, as did 32% and 63% of controls, respectively.
Stroke occurred in 7.5% of the RLS group and 4.2% of matched controls. The presence of diabetes more than doubled the stroke risk in both groups.
The risk of stroke was 18.2% in diabetic women with RLS and 7% in diabetic men with RLS. In a multivariate analysis that controlled for potential confounding factors, this translated to a threefold increased stroke risk.
Diabetes was associated with a doubling of stroke risk in subjects without RLS, but the risk was similar in men and women, according to Ms. Heis.
In addition to diabetes and female gender, the other major predictor of increased stroke risk in patients with RLS was, not surprisingly, hypertension. It was associated with a 13-fold increased likelihood of stroke, she noted.
RLS was initially linked to increased risk of coronary heart disease in a report from the Nurses’ Health Study (Circulation. 2012 Oct 2;126[14]:1689-94). In 2015, another research group linked more severe RLS to an increased risk of stroke. Ms. Heis and her coinvestigators carried out the current study to test their hypothesis that, since diabetes is a condition that accelerates cardiovascular disease, the endocrine disorder would boost stroke risk more in subjects with RLS than in those without it.
Ms. Heis reported having no financial conflicts regarding her study, which was conducted free of commercial support.