Last year about this time, I begged my doctors to let me try a relatively new drug for type 2 diabetics. It was showing promise in stabilizing blood sugars and helping diabetics lose weight.
Hallelujah and pass the pie! I can control my blood sugar better and lose weight?
Unfortunately my experiment with this drug, Byetta, lasted all of one month. It had requirements and side effects that I had not fully considered. The drug demanded constant refrigeration and rigid pre-meal injection times, neither of which fit into my hectic schedule. I found that when I injected and then failed to make my mealtime within an hour, there were gastrointestinal side effects—entirely acknowledged by the drugmaker—which I’d rather not describe.
Trying this new drug was an unusually hasty decision for me. Overall I’ve experimented very little with my regimen and have largely been satisfied sticking with glipizide and metformin, the two oral meds I currently take. I have to live with this disease for 40 or 50 years (hopefully); why rush into a new med?
When my general practitioner suggested I try Avandia, for example, back in 1999 when I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I declined. The drug was new to the market and lacked a track record, so I opted for older meds with less fanfare but more patient history.
Fast-forward to this past summer, when a New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that Avandia may increase the risk of heart attack and heart-related death. And now there’s a mouse study suggesting that Avandia may raise osteoporosis risk as well.
Maker GlaxoSmithKline acknowledges that a human population study has shown higher incidence of foot, hand, and upper arm fractures in women taking Avandia than with two other diabetes drugs observed but says these are not usually associated with the devastating disease of osteoporosis. And the drug is already labeled with relevant warnings in the U.S. and Europe, the company says.
Whether Avandia causes or contributes to bone-weakening issues, the drug’s long-term effects are clearly in dispute. I suspect that diabetics who take Avandia have all the hope for it that I did for Byetta.
When such medications make headlines, the news serves both as a caution against the irrational exuberance that greets every new drug and as a reminder that we patients need to understand that medications often have complex side effects—some of which are worth the risk, some of which are not, depending on the benefit of the drug. And those side effects may not be known when the drug is released.
Vital Statistics:
Managing diabetes is all about the numbers: blood sugar (normal approximately 70 to 120), caloric intake, calories burned, etc. Here are some of this week’s highlights.
My average blood sugar: 135
This week’s high: 210
This week’s low: 80
Oral meds taken this week: 14,000 mg metformin, 70 mg glipizide
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