Clinical studies with CE-inhibitors in diabetes

Early antihypertensive intervention in diabetes often means intervention in a cluster of cardiovascular risk factors including glucose intolerance per se, hyperlipidemia, obesity and hypertension, which are not just coexistent but may be causally linked together by the resistance of peripheral tissues to the action of insulin. Blood pressure lowering treatment should therefore be metabolically neutral in order to avoid aggravation of this risk factor syndrome. Clinical studies applying CE-inhibitors in type II diabetes are critically reviewed under this aspect. The majority of the available studies in type II diabetes report a reduction of insulin resistance and a marginal improvement of metabolic control. The order of magnitude in HbA1 reduction is nearly 10% of the glycosylated haemoglobin, reduction of fasting and postprandial blood glucose approximates 1 mmol/l. From a more extended view, considering essential hypertension as insulin resistant and thus possibly "prediabetic" state, this marginal metabolic effect gets further support from recent studies in essential hypertension consistently reporting an improvement of metabolic parameters of similar magnitude. This might become a central argument in the discussion about individualized and metabolically neutral antihypertensive treatment in essential hypertension.