Impaired Aortic Valve Growth in Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

The study have evaluated the differences in aortic valve dimensione between type 1 diabetic patients and control subjects. As reported in Table 1, females affected by type 1 diabetes showed an aortic annulus diameter of 9.9 0.9 mm/m2 compared with 11.7 1.1 mm/m2 in female controls (P < 0.01), whereas diabetic males presented a diameter of 10.1 1.1 mm/m2 compared with 11.9 1.4 mm/m2 (P < 0.01) in male controls. Interestingly, men with type 1 diabetes showed a significantly lower aortic annulus diameter than female controls. Moreover, when we compared subjects with the onset of diabetes earlier than 10 years of age (n ¼ 31) and then compared them with those with the onset of the disease later than 22 years of age (n ¼ 19), a tendency towards a lower annulus diameter in patients with an early onset of diabetes (9.8 0.9 vs 10.6 1.1 mm/m2 , respectively; P ¼ 0.07) was observed.