Research Information System
HealthMED, vol.6, no.12, pp.3977-3981, 2012 (Scopus)
Background: Presence of any relationship between digital clubbing and microvascular athe-rosclerosis was tried to be understood. Methods: Cases with digital clubbing and con-trols were studied. Results: The study included 104 cases with clubbing and 120 controls. Mean age of clubbing cases was 49.2 years, and there was a male predo-minance (81.7%) among them. There were signi-ficantly higher prevalences of smoking and chro-nic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the clubbing group (69.2 versus 41.6% and 27.8 ver-sus 10.8%, respectively, p<0.001 for both). Altho-ugh body mass index (BMI), weight, and fasting plasma glucose (FPG) were lower in the clubbing group, the differences were nonsignificant proba-bly due to the small sample sizes. Although the negative effect of small sample sizes, prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and mean value of systolic blood pressure (BP) were significanlty lower in the clubbing group (12.5 versus 21.6% and 127.6 versus 136.9 mmHg, respectively, p<0.05 for both). On the other hand, prevalence of coronary heart disease (CHD) and/or peripheric artery disease (PAD) were significantly higher in the clubbing group (7.6 versus 0.0%, p<0.01). Conclusions: There are significant relationshi-ps between digital clubbing and smoking, COPD, and CHD and/or PAD probably due to strong atherosclerotic effects of smoking with highly suspected atherosclerotic background of COPD. Whereas the BMI, weight, FPG, systolic BP, and prevalence of DM are inversely related with digi-tal clubbing probably due to suppressor effects of smoking on appetite. So clubbing may be a signi-ficant indicator of systemic atherosclerosis even at microvascular level.