Friday, September 30, 2011

Do Some Diabetes Drugs Actually Help Your Heart?

September 30th, 2011

written by Michael O’Leary
While looking to find harmful effects of type 2 diabetes drugs on the heart and cardiovascular system, researchers were surprised to find that at least one class of these drugs appear to actually help prevent such effects.

As reported on by MedPage Today at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting last week in Lisbon, Portugal, the researchers found that the class of drugs, called gliptins, were associated with 30 percent reduction in the risk of a major heart-related event, such as a heart attack, compared to diabetes patients who were taking another drug or placebo.

In the wake of the development of heart-related side effects of a cancer drug, called Avandia, last year, the FDA required drug companies to assess the cardiovascular risks of some of the new diabetes drugs.  (Link to published site)


Led by Dr. Edoardo Mannucci, director of the Diabetes Agency at Careggi Teaching Hospital in Florence, Italy, the study pooled outcomes data from 53 clinical trials involving more than 33,000 patients.

In the studies analyzed, 20,132 patients were treated with gliptins and 13,569 were treated with a comparable drug or placebo. They found that there were heart-related events reported in 42 of the 53 trials, and 137 events occurred in people taking gliptins, compared to 120 events in people taking another drug or placebo. After adjusting for the differences in the sizes of the two groups and other factors, they found that the risk of a major heart-event in the gliptin groups was 31.1 percent lower than the risk in those taking other drugs or placebo.

The study also seemed to show that the protective effect of gliptins is fairly immediate, in trials of less than a year in duration, they found the risk of heart events were 37.4 percent lower in the gliptin groups compared to those in the other groups.

The gliptin drugs found to protect against heart problems include Galvus (vildagliptin), Januvia (sitagliptin), Onglyza (saxagliptin), Nesina (alogliptin), Tradjenta (linagliptin) and dutogliptin. These drugs work to help regulate blood sugar by blocking a protein called dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DDP-4).

A word of caution regarding this study; the results should be considered preliminary because it was presented at a diabetes conference and has not yet been published by a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, the study author disclosed commercial interests in some of the drug companies that make gliptins, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Merck, Takeda, Novartis and others.

In other words, while this study was well-designed and carefully conducted, it is a preliminary study, and you might want to wait for studies that confirm or disprove these findings before you think about making a change to your diabetes medications.

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