Diabetes drug not always harmful on heart
Finally a good news for all the diabetes patients. A research in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health failed to produce reliable conclusions about the effects of oral diabetes medicines on cardiovascular health, despite controversy over the drug Avandia.
However, they have found that metformin seemed to be associated with a decrease in heart disease and heart-related deaths.
Researchers, led by Elizabeth Selvin, PhD, MPH, set out to evaluate how a group of newer and more expensive drugs that came to market beginning in 1995 compared with older medications used to treat type 2 diabetes. Avandia is one of the newer medications. An earlier study also looked at whether Avandia was riskier than other diabetes drugs.
The earlier analysis of the effect of diabetes drugs on cardiovascular health was associated with a higher risk of heart attack. However, researchers in that case also acknowledged that their conclusions were limited by a lack of access to original clinical data.
The trials that Selvin and her colleagues reviewed were done to assess the benefit or harm of oral diabetes medications approved in the U.S., including combinations of drug therapy. Participants ranged from 52 to 69, and 27 of the 40 trials followed patients for a year or less.
In their study, researchers did not find a significant difference between the ill or beneficial cardiovascular effects of any of the diabetes drugs. The relatively small differences in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and weight observed after treatment with various diabetes medications in the clinical trials “may not translate to changes in long-term cardiovascular health.
Source: WebMD
Filed under Diabetes, Diabetes Drug, Heart, NIDDM
