Objective:

To determine the prevalence of patients with probable diabetic cardiomyopathy (without requesting an endomyocardial biopsy), as well as to analyse its characteristics and comparing them with non-diabetic patients with idiopathic heart failure.

Methods:

A retrospective study was conducted on a cohort of 270 patients consecutively admitted to hospital due to heart failure. Excluded from the study were those who had a known cause of heart failure (ischaemic, hypertensive, hypertrophic, valvular, or other causes of heart disease). This left a total of 58 patients, 18 of whom were diabetics (the cause of heart failure could be due to diabetic cardiomyopathy) and 40 non-diabetics (idiopathic heart failure). A comparison was made between the characteristics of both groups. The statistical analysis and the comparison of the different variables were performed using Version 20.0 of the SPSS program.

Results:

Of the 270 patients studied, 18 could have been diagnosed with diabetic cardiomyopathy, which would be 6% of the cardiac failures in this series.

Conclusions:

It is believed that this study can lead to reflecting on the overall prevalence of diabetic cardiomyopathy, its characteristics, and the difficulties in its diagnosis.

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