If you are a diabetic and have heart disease, you are in a very special category, and it is important that your doctor have a full blown discussion with you and your loved ones about the diabetes and its implications for you as a heart patient or a person with heart disease. As you might be aware, diabetes aside from everything else it does is a general systems breakdown of the body. Whatever medical problems you may suffer from, whether it is heart disease or something else, diabetes contributes to making it worse.

Patients, who have heart disease and diabetes, do not ultimately succumb from the diabetes most of the time. They die from the heart disease which is accelerated by the patient being diabetic, and it is this information which is crucial for you to know. When plaque forms in your heart arteries, each patient has a different rate of growth of the plaque. It could be 10%, 20% or even 30% growth rates annually. A statin drug such as Lipitor will slow down that rate of growth considerably. Low dose 81mg aspirin according to some will also slow it down.

Nevertheless, once heart disease starts to grow there is still a rate of growth associated with the process. The problem with diabetes is that you can take the 10 percent to 30 percent rates of growth previously mentioned and threw them out the window, because with diabetes, all bets are off. It is not unusual for diabetics to have 100 percent plus annual rates of growth of heart disease.

This knowledge simply increases your need to make sure that if you are diabetic, you are doing everything to control it. Regular visits to your doctor, check-ups, and constant monitoring of your diabetes which every year gets easier and easier as technology improves will help ensure that you are doing everything possible to combat this incipient disease.