Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Spondyloarthritis is a chronic inflammatory rheumatic disease which may be associated with different comorbidities such as glucose intolerance.

Objectives: Determine the frequency of impaired fasting glucose in a population of patients with spondyloarthritis.

Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study including 50 patients with spondyloarthritis (SA) diagnosed according to ASAS criteria. Fasting glucose was measured for each patient.

Results: The mean age was 44.75 ± 13.5 years. Sex ration(M/F) was four. Clinical phenotypes of SA were: ankylosing spondylarthritis (51.9%),psoriatis arthritis(28%), arthritis associated with inflammatory bowel disease (10%). The mean duration of the disease was 93.27 month. the mean PCR, ESR, PCR-ASDAS and fasting glucose were 29.48, 36.55, 3.38 and 5.62 respectively.

Overweight and obesity were noted in 41.5% of cases.

Eighty-four percent of the patients have a normal fasting glucose,12% of them have a fasting glucose higher than 7 mmol which needs another control to diagnose diabetes and only 4% (n = 2) have an impaired fasting glucose.

There was no correlation between fasting glucose and these following parameters: PCR-ASDAS (P = 0.745), PCR (P = 0.291) and ESR (P = 0.803).

Discussion: More than 15% of patients with SA have an incorrect fasting glucose including glucose intolerance and diabetes, this pourcentage was higher in psoriatic patients and it was equal to 28.57.

Almost the half of the population are overweight or obese. these two items associated to SA increase the cardiovascular risk.

Conclusion: Identifying glucose intolerance in SA may help physicians to minimize cardiovascular mortality also it can ensure a better quality of life if treated early.