Zobel EH, et al. - The goal of this research was to examine toe–brachial index (TBI) and ankle–brachial index (ABI) as determinants of incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality in people with type 2 diabetes and microalbuminuria. The results of this study displayed that reduced TBI and ABI were correlated with increased risk of CVD and all-cause mortality, independent of traditional risk factors in type 2 diabetes, and improved prognostic accuracy.

• Researchers performed a prospective study enrolling a sum of 200 participants.
• They applied unadjusted and adjusted (traditional risk factors and additional inclusion of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide [NT-proBNP] and coronary artery calcification) Cox regression models.
• Furthermore, C statistics and relative integrated discrimination enhancement (rIDI) evaluated risk prediction improvement.

• In this study, 6.1 years was the median follow-up; 40 CVD events and 26 deaths were recorded. Lower TBI was associated with increased risk of CVD (HR per 1 SD decrease: 1.55 [95% CI 1.38, 1.68]) and all-cause mortality (1.41 [1.22, 1.60]) unadjusted and after adjustment for traditional risk factors (CVD 1.50 [1.27, 1.65] and all-cause mortality 1.37 [1.01, 1.60]).
• Lower ABI was a determinant of CVD (1.49 [1.32, 1.61]) and all-cause mortality (1.37 [1.09, 1.57]) unadjusted and after adjustment for traditional risk factors (CVD 1.44 [1.23, 1.59] and all-cause mortality 1.39 [1.07, 1.60]).
• The data indicated that lower TBI remained a determinant of CVD (p = 0.023) after additional adjustment for NT-proBNP and coronary artery calcification.
• When TBI was added to traditional risk factors, they observed that the AUC increased significantly for CVD, by 0.063 (95% CI 0.012, 0.115) from 0.743 (p = 0.016), but not for all-cause mortality; adding ABI did not improve the AUC significantly.
• The results showed that rIDI for TBI was 46.7% (p