Patients with type 2 diabetes who have a stroke experience poorer cognitive outcomes 3-6 months after the event than those without diabetes, a meta-analysis shows.

An international team of researchers, including clinicians from UNSW Sydney, analysed data from 1600 patients (mean age 66) from seven observational studies to assess the impact of impaired glycaemic control on cognitive performance following ischaemic stroke.

They found that patients with type 2 diabetes (fasting glucose at or more than 7mmol/L) had significantly poorer cognitive performance compared with those with normal glucose levels. But patients with prediabetes (fasting glucose 6.1-6.9mmol/L) showed no significant deficit.

The greatest deficits in cognition were in the attention domain followed by perceptual motor and executive function, whereas the least affected was memory function.