United States CABG Diabetes Project (USCDP) Pilot Study

Purpose Pilot study to gather information for "United States CABG Diabetes Project" (USCDP) Multi-center Randomized Trial.

For 14 years our research team has successfully implemented an increasingly aggressive series of intravenous insulin protocols that normalize blood glucose levels for 3 postoperative days in patients with diabetes who undergo cardiac surgery. This has resulted in significant reductions in mortality, infection and length of stay (LOS) and has normalized those outcomes to those of the population without diabetes (DM). The current protocol ends on the morning of the 3rd postoperative day.

We believe that a logical expansion of this groundbreaking work is to extend the duration of intensive glycemic control beyond the third postoperative day and into the outpatient period. However it would be impossible to do so with the continued use of CII therapy. Therefore, we propose to employ intensive subcutaneous insulin therapies and oral hypoglycemic agents to affect continued tight glycemic control following discontinuation of CII and continue such therapy beyond hospital discharge for a period of at least one year.

We hypothesize that this will lead to further reductions in major adverse cardiac outcomes in the high-risk diabetes coronary artery bypass grafts (CABG) subgroup. The optimal method to test this hypothesis is with a very large, multi-center clinical trial. However, before embarking on such a resource-consuming endeavor, we intend to test the concepts, methods, implementation strategies, patient acceptability and compliance, proposed biomarkers and clinical outcomes of such a trial with this proposed limited pilot study.

If the information obtained from this pilot study is favorable, we will submit for full funding of the multicenter USCDP clinical trial to the NIDDK and NHLBI divisions of the NIH. In order to test all aspects of the proposed trial, we intend to randomize patients into this pilot study.