Acute tubular necrosis in patients with diabetes mellitus.

We compared the clinical outcomes of patients with (n = 71) and without (n = 185) diabetes mellitus enrolled into the placebo arm of a large, multicenter clinical trial of patients with acute tubular necrosis (ATN). Compared with the nondiabetic patients, diabetic patients were older (65.5 +/- 12.9 versus 60.7 +/- 18.0 years, P < 0. 05), had higher usual serum creatinine concentration (1.7 +/- 0.6 versus 1.4 +/- 0.5 mg/dL, P < 0.001), and had a higher prevalence of underlying hypertension, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure (all P < 0.007). By day 21 after enrollment, neither mortality nor dialysis-free survival was different between the groups. Length of stay for surviving patients, in both the intensive care unit and the hospital, were significantly shorter for the diabetics. Among acute comorbidities predicting mortality or the need for dialysis, sepsis was more prevalent among the nondiabetic patients (18% versus 35%, diabetics versus nondiabetics, P < 0.05). In conclusion, clinical outcomes for diabetic patients with ATN were no worse than for nondiabetic patients, despite their older age and worse underlying renal function. Patients with diabetes mellitus had more chronic cardiovascular disease but were less acutely ill. We speculate that cardiovascular disease is a risk factor for ATN in patients with diabetes mellitus. These results fail to implicate the increasing prevalence of diabetes mellitus in the persistently poor prognosis of patients with ATN.