The Association of Folic Acid Deficiency and Diabetic Nephropathy in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetic Mellitus is the chronic metabolic illness characterised by hyperglycemia and various complications of heart, eyes, nerves, kidney etc. Diabetic Nephropathy is the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in diabetic patient. We hypothesized that decreased serum folic acid levels are associated with Diabetic Nephropathy.

Our study population consist of 100 subjects out of which 50 cases of Diabetes Mellitus are without Diabetic Nephropathy and 50 cases of Diabetes Mellitus with Diabetic Nephropathy. We measured various routine lab parameters, apart from that, we measured spot urinary albumin to creatinine ratio to assess diabetic nephropathy and we used chemiluminesence based immunoassay to measure serum folic acid.

Serum folic acid in the group with nephropathy was significantly lower than that of the group without nephropathy (4.9 ± 0.4 ng/dl) vs (6.8 ± 0.5 ng/dl) p = 0.05. We found that serum folic acid was negatively correlated with spot urinary albumin ratio and on multivariate logistic regression analysis we found that decrease in folic acid significantly (p < 0.05) increases the chances of diabetes with nephropathy by 19.9 %.

Our study tilt toward the deficiency of serum folic acid levels in diabetes mellitus patient with nephropathy. So if we would correct folic acid deficiency in diabetic patient then we could prevent the development of various complication associated with diabetes and help in reducing the morbidity and mortality of diabetic patient.