While having an unhealthy lifestyle can lead the way to type 2 diabetes, people with type 1 diabetes don’t have a choice in the matter. And as if being plagued by this disease for the rest of their life isn’t enough, there is another bigger problem that puts them in constant fear: death.

Heart disease and its fellow complications wipe off close to three times more people with type 1 diabetes than the rest of the population. According to a Swedish study, heart failure appears to strike more often in middle-aged men with type 1 diabetes. This fact probably doesn’t come to as a shock for some people, but some of you might want to hear what I have to say next.

What is bone-chilling about this scenario is that people with type 1 diabetes are more inclined to be hit with silent heart attacks. In other words, they could be experiencing a heart attack without their knowledge as they cannot feel any symptoms. Despite having a perfect control over your blood sugar levels, another group of Swedish researchers found that patients with type 1 diabetes are three times more likely to die from a heart disease compared to non-diabetics.

Type 1 Diabetes & Heart Attack

Myra Lipes, MD, is an investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center, and she explained that the strategy used to counter heart disease should be different for type 2 and type 1 diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, the production of insulin is impeded by an autoimmune reaction. This autoimmune reaction shares some resemblance with the action of a protein called alpha-myosin. Studies in both mice and humans showed that this protein is nestled in the heart and triggers chronic heart inflammation. While this process naturally goes away in the general population who experiences a heart attack, the same cannot be said for people with type 1 diabetes. On the long run, this reaction can eat away your heart and pave the way to heart failure.

Did you know?

According to a study published in the journal Circulation AHA, roughly 45% of heart attacks are silent. Researchers were only able to detect these silent myocardial infarctus using an electrocardiogram (ECG).

Why are there no symptoms?

Uncontrolled diabetes can result in nerve damage (neuropathy) which prevents people with diabetes from experiencing any warning signs of heart attack (e.g chest pain). Some people may only notice a spike in their blood sugar and weakness during the event of a heart attack. Even though you might not experience any obvious, noticeable effects of a silent heart attack at the time of the event, it should not be taken likely as after-effects may give forth to devastating repercussions.