Cardiovascular disease is already known to be the main cause of long-term complications and death in patients with diabetes. Prior to the current study, however, the risk for death from cerebrovascular disease had not been reported for patients with type 1 disease. “The results from this group of patients with type 1 diabetes show that at all ages death from cerebrovascular disease is higher in the patients with diabetes than in the general population,” said lead author Susan P. Laing, Ph.D.

Laing noted that the risk of stroke relative to the general population was greatest at 20 to 39 years of age, in part reflecting the very low overall death rate from cerebrovascular disease in young adults. “These observations emphasize the vital need to identify and treat known cardiovascular risk factors in young people with diabetes,” she said.

The study, called the Diabetes United Kingdom Cohort, included 23,751 patients diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before age 30 years. It recorded cerebrovascular death rates by age and gender. Researchers followed patients for an average of 17 years. Then they compared standardized mortality ratios, calculations of the number of observed deaths in the study group compared with the number of expected deaths from cerebrovascular disease in the general population.

There were 1,437 deaths in the patient group, with 80 due to cerebrovascular disease. Cerebrovascular disease was responsible for 4 percent of all deaths under the age of 40 years and 8 percent over age 40 years. Overall, the rates were significantly higher than those for the general population. For the group with the greatest increase in risk --- people ages 20 to 39 years--- the risk of cerebrovascular death was increased more than 5-fold in men and 7-fold in women compared with rates for the general population.