A study in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that patients with type 2 diabetes who did not have any risk factors — smoking, albuminuria or abnormal A1C, blood pressure or LDL cholesterol — did not have excess mortality risk or increased risk for acute myocardial infarction or stroke, but they were at a higher risk for heart failure, compared with those who did not have diabetes. Researchers studied more than 270,000 Swedish registry patients with diabetes and found that smoking was the top predictor for mortality, while A1C above the target range was the strongest predictor for acute MI and stroke.
