Prevention of cardiovascular disease in diabetes mellitus: by stressing the CARDS study.

Recently, diabetes mellitus has become a global epidemic disease. There is a study indicating that type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) is frequently found in children and teenager. Furthermore, in some countries, it is more frequent than type 1 diabetes mellitus.1 WHO stated that in the year of 2000, there were 177 million diabetes mellitus patient in the world and it is predicted that in the year of 2030, it will be increased to 366 million.2 This is very problematical for some countries such as India, People's Republic of China and Indonesia where the prevention and treatment facilities are still inadequate. To date, Indonesia has occupied the 4th rank, with predicted number of diabetes mellitus patient about 8.4 million and this number will be increased to 21.3 million in the year of 2030. There is no data about the number of patient with metabolic syndrome (MS) and insulin resistance syndrome (IR), but it should be higher than the number of diabetic patient. As we all have known, these conditions are the high-risk condition of diabetes mellitus development.2 One of reasons concerning why prevalence and pre-diabetic condition are increased (including the increased MS) is rising obesity frequency. In the United States, over 60% of recent adult population are overweight, which is defined as "body mass index" (BMI) 25; and about 30% of them have obesity, which is defined as BMI 30%.3 If diabetes mellitus occurred, cardiovascular disease (CVD) including coronary heart disease (CHD) also may occur. It is important to prevent the diabetes mellitus as well as to prevent the complication risk of CVD in diabetic patient.