Diabetic kidney disease and vascular comorbidities in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in a developing country.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is associated with an increased risk of progression toward end-stage renal disease and cardiovascular (CV) risk mortality. To investigate this association, we studied 637 patients with T2DM in the Eastern area of Morocco. The mean follow-up period was 42 ± 11 months. At the baseline visit, 22.8%, 59.1% and 18.1% of the patients had normo-albuminuria, micro-albuminuria and macro-albuminuria, respectively. Of all patients, 51.6% had a history of hypertension and 37.4% had hypertension on admission. At the end of follow-up, rapid progression (estimated glomerular filtration rate >5 mL/min/1.73 m² /year) was observed in 24.1% of the cases and the frequency of occurrence of CV events was 5%, 18.5% and 32.5% in the normo-, micro- and macro-albuminuria groups, respectively (P <0.001). In multivariate analysis, arterial hypertension was identified as an independent risk factor related to diabetic kidney disease (DKD, P = 0.04) and occurrence of CV events (P = 0.02), while albuminuria was not identified as an independent risk factor, either for DKD or for the occurrence of CV events. Our study found that hypertension was an independent risk factor for the DKD and the occurrence of the CV events in T2DM patients.