Relationship of Cardiovascular and Gastrointestinal Neuropathy inDiabetics

Summary

Background.
The presence of autonomic neuropathy impairs the quality of life (orthostatic hypotension, impo-tence, gastroparesis) or endangers the life of diabetics (sudden death, unawarness of hypoglycemia). The purposeof the investigation was: 1. To assess the presence of the autonomic neuropathy of the cardiovascular and thegastrointestinal systems and their mutual relationship. 2. To assess the relationship of found autonomic neuropathyand the subjective symptoms which are typical to affected particular systems (cardiovascular, gastrointestinal,genitourinary, sudomotor systems and the syndrom of unawareness of hypoglycemia).Methods and Results. The group comprised of 25 type 1 diabetic patients (12 women and 13 men) mean age40.5±11.6 (range 21Š57 years) with a mean duration of diabetes of 17.8±7.9 (range 4Š35 years), treated withintensified insulin regimens. The cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy was automaticaly examined by the VariaPulseTF 3 computer system. Scintigraphy was used to investigate the gastric emptying time of99mTc labelled rice. Theinformation about the subjective symptoms we collected from the questionnaire. For statistic analysis we usedSpearmen correlations and ANOVA. Results: 1. A statistically significant correlation was found between thepresence of the autonomic neuropathy of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems (r=0.634, p

Key words:
diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy, gastroparesis, gastric emptying, visceralneuropathy.