Reducing Kidney and CV Complications in Diabetes: 'Room for Improvement'

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Anne L. Peters, MD: Hello. I'm Anne Peters from the University of Southern California, and I'm joined today by Peter Rossing from the Steno Diabetes Center in Copenhagen. Peter, you gave the Edwin Bierman Lecture at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) this year called "Linking Kidney and Cardiovascular Complications—Impact on Prognosis and Treatment." Could you go through a little of what you talked about and what you think is clinically important in terms of biomarkers and new clinical treatments for reducing cardiovascular and kidney disease risks?

Terrible Triad: CKD, CVD, and Diabetes

Peter Rossing, MD, DMSc: It was really a pleasure, and I am very happy that there has been a lot of focus on both cardiovascular and renal complications at ADA. It's a very important topic. I talked about how having diabetes does not have a very good prognosis, but kidney disease on top of that will increase the risk for cardiovascular complications, both myocardial infarction and heart failure. Therefore, it's important to look out for kidney disease. It's a kind of modifier, and you have this triad of adverse diseases: diabetes, kidney, and cardiovascular.

We have been looking at this epidemiologic link, but we can use a lot of biomarkers to predict kidney or cardiovascular disease that are shared by these two complications of diabetes.