June 24, 2014 – Inhaled insulin

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Anchor lead:  Will a new form of inhaled insulin avoid the side effects seen before? Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you needed to take insulin to control your diabetes, you’d probably opt for avoiding injections if possible, and that’s the promise of a newly FDA approved inhaled form of the hormone.  Rita Kalyani, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, is cautiously optimistic.

Kalyani: I think it certainly adds a different route of administration for this medication that we don’t have in diabetes care right now. Also from that perspective it could be very attractive particularly for patients for whom injecting insulin is a barrier.  I do think that there will need to be some caution and careful monitoring of these patients particularly in regards to pulmonary function and understanding the long term risks, as we saw with the inhaled insulin that had been approved a few years ago.  So while some patients will find this an attractive option we still need to emphasize that long term monitoring of risks has not yet been done.   :35

So talk with your doctor to see if inhaled insulin may be right for you.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.