Unknown Diabetes Mellitus Among Apparently Healthy Men With “Nonspecific” T Wave Abnormalities—in a Mental Hospital

A group of 117 psychiatric male inpatients under age fifty, physically healthy, without known diabetes or manifest heart disease or electrocardiographic evidence of myo-cardial infarction, were given a 100-gm., two-hour oral glucose tolerance test because their electrocardiograms showed inverted or isoelectric T waves. These men were compared with a similarly studied control group of 303 who did not have such nonspecific abnormalities. Significantly more diabetes was discovered in the former group among those aged forty to forty-nine. At that age, then, abnormal T waves were significantly associated with previously unknown diabetes. Results suggest there is an unusually high prevalence of undetected diabetes among apparently healthy men in their forties who have these nonspecific T wave abnormalities.