New Type 2 Diabetes Drug Delays Disease Progression

But side effects include cardiovascular risks, study finds

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

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MONDAY, Dec. 4 (HealthDay News) -- One of a new class of diabetes drugs delayed the progression of type 2 diabetes along with the need to add additional medications.

But it's not clear how the findings will affect actual practice because diabetes drugs tend to involve a complicated constellation of benefits and side effects.

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In particular, this drug, Avandia (rosiglitazone), resulted in blood sugar staying normal longer but carried with it various cardiovascular risks and is expensive.

"You have to take into consideration the potential benefit versus the potential risk," said Dr. Robert Rizza, past president of the American Diabetes Association and professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn.

The results of the trial are even less encouraging when taken in concert with a previous study that also found an excess of cardiovascular events.

"Because of the fact that adverse cardiovascular events went in the wrong direction in the [previous] trial and because they go in the wrong direction in this trial, I have concerns about the overall benefit of rosiglitazone in diabetic patients who are highly vulnerable to adverse cardiovascular outcomes, and this is not, in my view, a very favorable result," said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, interim chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.

"Something is happening here which has pretty profound public health implications," added Nissen, who recently uncovered cardiac problems with muraglitazar, a not-yet-approved diabetes drug in the same class as Avandia, and published those findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The new study appears in the Dec. 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and is being released early to coincide with a presentation Monday at the World Diabetes Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.

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