Intima-media thickness and atherosclerotic plaques in popliteal, tibial, brachial and radial arteries in 65-year-old Finns with diabetes

T he aim of the present study was to examine the intima-media thickness (IMT) and the number of atherosclerotic plaques in the medium-sized arteries of the lower and upper limbs in 65-year-old Finns (45 diabetic subjects, 65 subjects with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and 38 normoglycaemic (NGT) subjects). The maximal IMT of radial arteries was higher in subjects with diabetes (0.41 mm+0.07) than in those with IGT (0.36 mm+0.06) or NGT (0.35 mm+0.07) (p<0.001), but in popliteal, tibial and brachial arteries there were no significant differences between the groups. A large proportion of the study population had plaques in their lower limb arteries and some subjects had a very high number of plaques. The proportion of subjects with diabetes in the highest quintile of the number (> 79) of tibial plaques was 47%, while the cor- responding number was 26% among those with a lower number of plaques (p=0.030). The occurrence of plaques in brachial and radial arteries was low. Diabetic subjects tended to have radial plaques more often than subjects with IGT and NGT. Br J Diabetes Vasc Dis 2005;5:277-80 In clinical work, angiography is performed before planning revascularisation procedures. We found no studies describing the arterial ultrasonographic findings in lower extremities in unse- lected diabetic subjects. We carried out a population-based study on the determinants of ultrasonographic manifestations of ath- erosclerosis in northern Finland. The study was focused on sub- jects with diabetes and IGT. Recently, we reported our results on carotid arteries, aorta and femoral arteries. 5-8 In this paper, we focus on medium-sized arteries in the lower and upper extremi- ties, i.e. popliteal, tibial, brachial and radial arteries. Our purpose was to find out if some ultrasonographic manifestations are typ- ical of subjects with diabetes. Materials and methods