Patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) appear to have an increased risk of developing diabetes mellitus, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. This suggests that common disease mechanisms exist between the two disorders.
Diabetes mellitus is common in patients with late-onset MG (ie, age 50 or above). Yet different studies report differing statistics on how often the two diseases co-exist.
In this study, researchers sought to review existing studies on this matter to investigate the incidence rate of diabetes mellitus among patients with MG, with the goal of delivering better care to patients and refining future research goals.
After carrying out an extensive search on academic search engines for papers that were written on this subject, the research team selected 11 for their final review. In total, these 11 studies included 16,825 patients with MG. They found that the pooled prevalence of diabetes mellitus (either type 1 or type 2) among patients with MG was 15.6%. This figure was higher than the pooled prevalence of diabetes mellitus among 291,626 individuals in the control group, which was 13.5%.
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The research team found that patients with MG had a 1.24-fold higher risk of developing diabetes compared to healthy individuals.
There are many factors that may explain the relationship between the two diseases, such as underlying genetics, the tendency of patients with MG to reduce their physical activity due to weakness (which may lead to a sedentary lifestyle) and the types of drugs involved in treating MG, such as long-term corticosteroids.
“Future research should aim to systematically explore the sequence of disease onset, the type of diabetes, and pertinent clinical factors — such as cumulative corticosteroid exposure, non-steroid immunosuppressive treatment and treatment duration — in patients with myasthenia gravis and concurrent diabetes,” the authors of the study wrote.
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