For the UF study, funded by the Diabetes Action Research and Education Foundation, the Children ™s Miracle Network and the UF Clinical Research Center, researchers evaluated nearly 100 children with type 1 diabetes and 57 healthy children, all 10 to 18 years of age. They then matched a total of 44 pairs of children on the basis of age, sex, race and body mass index. They used a method called radial artery tonometry, which involves placing a pencil-sized probe on the pulse point at the wrist to calculate the pressures generated by flowing blood.

The pressure wave there gives us the information as to how flexible or stiff the vessels are, said Haller, who collaborated on the study with Dr. Janet Silverstein, a professor and chief of the division of endocrinology at UF.

The scientists also measured study participants ™ cholesterol and blood glucose levels and blood pressure, took a detailed family history and inquired about their exercise regimens.

Regardless of the values for glucose levels, blood pressure and cholesterol, children with type1 diabetes had stiffer vessels than controls, Haller said. That ™s been confirmed in a couple of other recent studies using different noninvasive techniques. The advantage of our technique is it ™s very easy to reproduce, and it ™s a portable system that can be learned by almost anybody. That has potential implications for its future use as a clinical tool.

Researchers still don ™t know what the real risk of heart disease is over time for children whose vessels were stiffer; long-term studies will need to be conducted to assess that.

For the study we did, we couldn ™t say that because a child had stiffer vessels their risk of heart disease was X percent higher, Haller said. But you ™d assume that risk is higher.

If the technique proves valuable, radial artery tonometry could easily be incorporated into routine evaluations of patients with diabetes, or who are otherwise at risk for heart disease because of family history or other factors, he said.

The long preclinical phase of atherosclerotic diseases provides a window for the early identification of high-risk individuals with asymptomatic arterial changes in childhood using noninvasive techniques, said Dr. Mikko J?¤rvisalo, of Turku University Hospital in Turku, Finland. Extensive prospective studies are needed before these methods can be accepted as tools for routine clinical practice, but hopefully the techniques will in the future help physicians in risk stratification of young patients with cardiovascular risk factors, including children with diabetes.

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