What are the best medicines to manage diabetes? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

If you have type 2 diabetes, what are the best medicines to manage it? A new meta-analysis looks at aggregated data from a number of studies and comes out in favor of the newer classes of drugs. Rita Kalyani, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, describes the results.

Kalyani: They found that as a class SGLT 2 inhibitors and GLP 1 receptor agonists reduced all cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events compared to other treatments and when they compared specific combinations such as sulfonylureas and insulin with the newer medications, SGLT 2s and GLP ones for a side effect of interest, severe hypoglycemia, they found that these newer medications also significantly reduced hypoglycemia. Not unexpected.    :32

Kalyani notes that all participants in these studies had risk factors for heart disease, so the results do not apply to everyone with type 2 diabetes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.