When are newer diabetes medicines best? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Let’s say you’ve just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but outside of that condition you have no other health issues. Should you take a newer class of diabetes medicine or will one of the older ones serve you just as well? That’s one issue with a new metanalysis of diabetes medicines, says Johns Hopkins diabetes expert Rita Kalyani.

Kalyani: As someone who has spent a lot of time looking at these trials it is important to recognize that these trials specifically enrolled populations at high risk for cardiovascular disease and whether these findings can be generalized to the general population of people with diabetes we don't have enough evidence to make that statement. And I think because this was meant to look at the outcomes perhaps those nuances of the populations which are important for applicability to real world care may not have been detailed.  :34

Kalyani notes that newer medicine are much more expensive. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.