Impact of Diabetes Mellitus.

The global prevalence of diabetes mellitus among adults has risen from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2014, increasing the number of adults with diabetes mellitus to a staggering 422 million worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. For comparison, this number is larger than the total population of the United States. Diabetes mellitus not only reduces quality of life and life expectancy, but is also a major cause of several microvascular complications and macrovascular complications that lead to blindness, renal failure, myocardial infarction, stroke, and the necessity to amputate limbs. The burden of diabetes mellitus–associated complications worldwide is therefore a major healthcare problem that we urgently need to find solutions to. In this context, a large body of research has been devoted to identifying risk factors of vascular complications of diabetes mellitus with the goal of improving prevention of these complications. Such research has revealed that vascular complications of diabetes mellitus are associated with multiple risk factors—including dyslipidemia, hypertension, smoking, age, metabolic control, and systemic inflammation—and that the relative contribution of these risk factors is likely to vary depending on the type of diabetes mellitus and what risk factors are present in a given subject. Other research is aimed at finding novel and reliable biomarkers for vascular complications of diabetes mellitus and novel targets for treatment. In this review, we highlight manuscripts published in ATVB within the past 2 years, focusing on novel pathways that might contribute to vascular complications of diabetes mellitus. This work ranges from experiments on isolated cells to animal models of diabetes mellitus to studies in humans.