Are certain diabetes medicines best for specific people? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Diabetes medicine known as GLP-1 agonists and SGLT-2 inhibitors are recommended for people with type 2 diabetes in a recent large study that aggregated data from other studies. Rita Kalyani, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, says while there’s no doubt these medicines are effective, there is a downside.

Kalyani: The challenge becomes that many of these newer medications are also very costly and so they there are significant economic implications for using medications that have high cost in populations that could benefit equally or perhaps if not more from other classes that we currently have available. This meta analysis that we're talking about assumed that everyone was on metformin monotherapy as background which is what we found in the trials, 80 to 90% were on metformin so we're not talking about comparisons to metformin.        :30

Kalyani says it’s important to take into account someone’s entire health picture to choose the diabetes medicines that are best for them. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.