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The heart-protective benefits provided by high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, better known as "good" cholesterol may be lowered by diabetes, but giving diabetic patients niacin, a drug that increases HDL levels, might restore HDL’s beneficial effect, researchers said on Tuesday, Dec. 22.
The heart risk-lowering effect of HDL is possible because it removes "bad" low-density lipoprotein, otherwise known as LDL cholesterol, from arteries and returns it to the liver where it is eliminated from the body. Other studies done recently further indicate that HDL provides protection to arteries by promoting cellular processes such as healing and repair.
However in diabetic people, the protection offered by HDL may be lowered, according to the researchers at the University Hospital Zurich and the Medical School of Hannover in Germany who reported their findings in the journal Circulation.
For the study, the research team made a comparative analysis of the vessel-protecting effect of HDL samples from 10 healthy adults against that of 33 patients with type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, a condition that is partly characterized by low levels of HDL. All of the participants who had diabetes were taking statins, drugs that act to lower the levels of “bad” cholesterol.
According to the researchers, they found in the laboratory that the protective effects on blood vessels were "substantially impaired" in HDL samples obtained from the study participants with diabetes than that of the samples obtained from health people.
The participants who were diabetics were then divided by the research team – half of them were given a placebo while the other half were treated with extended-release niacin, a medication that raises the blood levels of HDL.
After a period of three months, patients who were treated with niacin had increased levels of HDL, and showed remarkable improvement in the protective effects of HDL in laboratory testing as well as in vascular function.
Since the study was just small, the investigators said that more research is essential in order to see if extended-release niacin, like Niaspan, a product of Abbott Laboratories Inc., may have beneficial effects on diabetic people.
There are approximately 11 percent of adults with diabetes in the United States. Majority of them have type 2 diabetes, the type of diabetes that’s closely associated with obesity.
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