Diabetes: How does it affect the heart? Dr. Kim Pugh: Diabetes is associated with heart disease, stroke disease and it's indirectly by raising your blood sugar, different things happen at the cellular level, you have inflammatory proteins, you have a tendency to have more trouble with athlete sclerosis, you have a tendency more so to have the coronary heart disease, which develops because of the arthritis or people are more prone to congestive heart failure. So it's an indirect response, it's not like, boom you have diabetes, you have heart disease. They go hand in hand but it's over a long period of time.