Diabetes and Arrhythmias

Clinical trials in diabetics with and without CAD question the safety of very intensive blood sugar control with its attendant risk of hypoglycaemia.

Dr Sheridan and Professor Heller co-supervise both Dr Elaine Chow (a diabetology SpR recruited to a CVBRU 12 month clinical entry fellowship) and a BMedSci student to investigate the role of glycaemic instability in sudden cardiac death; specifically the electropysiological response to spontaneous hypoglycaemic episodes in type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

It is recognised that hypoglycaemia in type 1 diabetes may account for unexpected deaths due to ventricular arrhythmias. The precise mechanism has proved difficult to unpick but important electrocardiographic abnormalities, particularly abnormal cardiac repolarisation may herald the onset of arrhythmia. Patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes will be recruited over the next 12 months.

The CVBRU has supported Professor Heller and Dr Sheridan in a pilot study to address how glucose concentration and cardiac autonomic innervation affect cardiac action potential duration, funded by Sheffield Hospitals Charitable Trust, aiming to recruit the 16 patients.

A glucose analyser machine has been purchased its consumables are funded by the CVBRU and a CVBRU nurse assists the investigators throughout the patient visits and study protocol, performed in the Catheter Suite at Northern General. This study has started recruitment.