Blood Pressure Control to Reduce Renal Risk for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

The evidence from previous literature shows importance of the blood pressure control in T2DM. About 20% (16-29%) reduction in microalbuminuria development can be reached by continuously lowering blood pressure level from 154/87 mmHg to 144/82 mmHg (the UKPDS), to 134.7/74.8 mmHg (the ADVANCE study), and even to 119.3/64.4 mmHg (the ACCORD study). However, several limitations are also inherent in the above well-known studies. First, most of the recruited participants previous trials were Caucasians. Although 3293 Chinese patients were recruited in the ADVANCE study, they only accounted for 29.6% of total enrollees in that trial. The representative of Asian population is inadequate. There is also lack of domestic evidence-based guideline designated for Taiwanese T2DM patients in optimizing their blood pressure control. In addition, some characteristics in Asian T2DM population are different from what have been observed in the Caucasian T2DM patients. For example, there is BMI discrepancy between T2DM in Western and Eastern countries, more ACEi/ARB side effects (e.g., cough) observed in Asian population, and the possible difference in CKD/ESRD incidence in T2DM between different ethnic groups.

Moreover, the enrollees in most well-known trials (e.g., ADVANCE and ACCORD studies) were those who suffered from at least one cardiovascular risk factor for secondary prevention. To our best knowledge, there is no study designed to evaluate effectiveness of blood pressure control for T2DM patients without previous CV events. Therefore, we initiated a prospective randomized controlled trial to investigate the renal protection effect for tight blood pressure control for Taiwanese T2DM patients without previously diagnosed CV events. We set our primary outcome for the prevention of microalbuminuria development to partly respond to the urgent need for this society in solving the huge burden caused by the high incidence and prevalence of diabetic nephropathy in Taiwan.

The study includes two parts: (1) a RCT trial, (2) an observational cohort study. The recruitment period of this study is from 2013 Oct to 2019 Dec. The RCT trial will be ended in 2019 Dec. In addition, we also intend to continuously follow up all our recruited hypertensive diabetes patients for at least 10 years to observe their clinical outcomes including cardiovascular, renal, retinal outcomes and mortality (the part of the observational cohort study).