Women with diabetes run a greater risk of dying from heart disease than do men with diabetes, Australian researchers report.

“More aggressive treatment of cardiovascular risk factors among women with diabetes may help to offset the increase in mortality from coronary heart disease among older postmenopausal women,” Dr. Rachel Huxley told AMN Health.

Diabetes is a well-established risk factor heart disease, doubling the risk of a fatal cardiac event.

“There is, however, much debate over whether diabetes carries different heart risks for women than for men,” said Huxley, senior epidemiologist at The George Institute for International Health at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Using data on more than 450,000 adults, Huxley’s group found that after adjusting for smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other cardiovascular risk factors, women with diabetes had significantly greater risk of dying from heart disease than did men with diabetes.

Compared to people without diabetes, the risk of cardiovascular death was 2.48-times higher for diabetic women but only 1.87-times greater for diabetic men, according to results presented Friday in Orlando at the Second International Conference on Women, Heart Disease, and Stroke.

“This translates to a greater than 50 percent excess relative risk for diabetic women than for diabetic men,” Huxley pointed out.

The researchers are currently conducting a 4-year study involving more than 11,000 people to determine whether more intensive control of blood glucose levels, combined with blood-pressure lowering, reduces heart disease mortality in people with type 2 diabetes.