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FDA Approves New Drug for Type 2 Diabetes
Neopallium writes to tell us that the FDA has approved the first of a new kind of treatment for type 2 diabetes. From the article: "JANUVIA belongs to a new breakthrough class of prescription medications called dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors that improves blood sugar control in patients with type 2 diabetes. JANUVIA enhances a natural body system called the incretin system, which helps to regulate glucose by affecting the beta cells and alpha cells in the pancreas. Through DPP-4 inhibition, JANUVIA works only when blood sugar is elevated to address diminished insulin due to beta-cell dysfunction and uncontrolled production of glucose by the liver due to alpha-cell and beta-cell dysfunction."
Here's the PubMed link to the Merck Research in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
Another downside of obese life eliminated...now if they could just make a pill that would make fat people look attractive at the beach, there'd be no limits to the future of American corpulence!
While being fat does appear to have a correlation with type2 diabetes, genetics appears to have a greater effect. I am not fat, but have suffered from type2 for a number of years. Any medical advances dealing with this are most welcome.
*faint*
Meta will eat itself
Folks, this is some pretty big news in biotech. While not a cure for cancer, over 20 million people have diabetes. Just taking insulin is a tricky business, and even in the best of cases leads to necrosis (cell death) in the hands and feet, along with blindness and kidney failure. Think of it like a pendulum...the more you mess with it, the farther it swings - like steroids. This works on fixing the problem without that pendulum swing. It's worthy of a front page.
It's an upstream inhibitor of glucagon. Glucagon signals the body that it has low blood sugar. It tells the liver to produce sugars in response, because the body thinks you're in a fasting state. In a normal person glucagon is inhibited when you eat food, because insulin is released. Insulin tells the body - 'It's Dinner Time!!' - and you're liver production of sugar stops as blood sugar is used up. Apparently this system gets screwed up in people with diabetes, as the balancing act between insulin and glucagon doesn't work properly. Therefore this medication will help the body realize, that when blood sugar is high, to stop liver production of sugars (and possibly tell the pancreas to release insulin), which should aid diabetics in controlling blood sugar levels.
The medicine is great for the people that need it, I'm sure. But let's go off on a tangent; I see a number of posters already are doing so.
Why are so many slashdrones so terribly hostile toward diabetics? It's not possible to post a story mentioning diabetes without various people posting inaccurate information ("Being lazy and getting fat causes diabetes!") combined with hearty invective ("You're sub-human slobs and you all deserve to die!").
(Just for the record, obesity is associated with diabetes but is not the cause. Diabetes is a failure of various regulatory mechanisms and heredity plays a big part. There's lots of good research that indicates the process of becoming diabetic tends to make you fat rather than the reverse. And treatment is severely problematical, often because common drugs cause massive weight gain, a problem this new drug is supposed to address.)
So why all the bile poured out on diabetes sufferers? I really don't understand it. There are lots of other diseases that make people unattractive or can be partially blamed on lifestyle, but I don't see anyone jumping on the "People get cancer because they're stupid!" or the "All alcoholics should be shot!" bandwagons, even though those ideas make about as much sense as condemning diabetics for being sick.
What's up? Anyone want to clue me in?
Instead of making America take more drugs and waste more money, how about they just ban high fructose corn syrup? We might not have the big diabetes epidemic we have right now if we stopped filling all our food with such a dangerous sweetener. But of course, our government is more concerned with the "rights" of big business than the well-being of the people that it supposedly serves. And those pharmacutical companies that "donate" to our politicians stand to make a larger killing off of this than they would with an actual good plan.
disclaimer: I am a pharmacologist. I do not work for Merck or any other drug company. I do work for an ICU specialist group.
This drug works by decreasing the amount of sugar produced by the liver. In most type II diabetics the liver produces too much, for reasons we only partly understand. It also makes the pancreas produce more insulin in response to high blood sugar. This mechanism is also defective in type II diabetes, again for reasons poorly understood. It does these things by a new mechanism of action, and is the first drug that affects the first problem I listed above.
Does your father go to an endocrinologist? Diabetes is still not as well understood as we would like, and this is the third brand new treatment for diabetes in the last couple of years (one of them is for type I diabetics only). There are a lot of new options out there.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Someday, one of these announcements will actually help those of us with Juvenile Diabetes (Type 1), who have to take multiple shots a day and not just pop a pill.
Genetics sucks.
My wife is Type 1 diabetic, and her take on this is that $5 a pill is a lot of money for something that doesn't really work any better than the existing therapies available at 50 cents a pill. Getting A1C readings down to 7 is nothing to crow about. 7 is still too high. To minimize the long term complications of uncontrolled blood sugars, you really want your A1C down around 6.
I have been doing this for the last few months and it has really turned the tide for me, before I really felt like I was loosing the battle against diabetes. The only trick is finding the right *kind* of cinnamon can be difficult. There are hundreds of types of cinnamon and the kind you want is commonly called "cassia" or "cinnamonium aromium" (sp?) or sometimes "cinnamonium romulus" (generally the chinese name). It is grown in indonesia and china. Problem being that most cinnamons sold in the US are blends of Saigon Cinnamon which does not seem to have the same properties. A number of nutrition stores sell cinnamon pills (vitamin shoppe, gnc) that have the correct cinnamon in them. Currently the best price i've found is at GNC -- if you buy their GNC card ($15/year) it knocks a bottle of 200 pills down to about $12. Before you say "thats expensive for cinammon" as yourself -- what are you spending on medication right now? On your glucophage, on your metformin, on your zocor, on your benazepril, on your insulin?
For me the cinnamon does not have the horrible side effects of things like metformin and glucophage. The side effects (sudden intense hunger, increased appetite) make me eat more, gain weight, and thus require more medication. I am not suggesting you replace your medications for cinnamon, but if you are having trouble controlling your blood sugar, try adding cinnamon to your diet. If you are not having trouble, try replacing some of your medication with cinnamon.
I am planning on starting a website soon about this to try and get the word out. How many times in life is there something simple and safe that can improve your health?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley