Diabetes and Heart Disease

Dr. Sinatra: Question from an e-letter subscriber. Dr. Sinatra, I have diabetes and I have coronary artery disease as well. Do I have a problem?

Unfortunately, you do have a problem. In my practice, I used to always worry about my diabetics with coronary disease because diabetes ages your blood vessels. I remember when I was in medical school, there was an x-ray put up, and [sic] it showed a calcification of the femoral artery. And the answer to the question was: What is this disease that this woman has? And nobody got it right. She had diabetes and she had calcification of the blood vessel.

We know that if you have diabetes, you can age quicker, and usually it can be 10 to 15 years ahead of the normal population. Another thing I've learned about diabetes, which really bothers me, and I've only written about this in my newsletter last month, is that diabetics tend to have thickened blood. They have hypercoagulable blood. We call it a thickened blood viscosity. So, it's very important to know this—and if you do have coronary disease and diabetes at the same time, you need to take aggressive measures to really take on a program of thinning the blood. So, it's important to really get your diabetes under control. Work with a doctor who's going to use various natural blood thinners and also work with your doctor about using conventional blood thinners as well.