Diabetes Medication

The diabetes drug called liraglutide, marketed as Victoza, can reverse a common and serious complication of diabetes, according to a new study. This is good news for anyone who is already taking it or Byetta or Bydureon to manage blood glucose.

This complication goes by the mouthful of a name “non-alcoholic steatohepatitis,” or NASH, which is inflammation of the liver, which a buildup of fat in the liver causes. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, which half to 70 percent of all people with type 2 diabetes have, can lead to NASH.

Continue Reading

Stop taking calcium even if you have diabetes: It doesn’t work and it has side effects, including heart attacks. This is the blunt message of recent studies of this mineral.

Our doctors have been telling us for years that we need 1,000 to 1,200 mg of calcium to prevent osteoporosis and bone fractures. They were wrong, they now admit.

Because of this bad advice more than 60 percent of American women aged 60 or more were taking calcium supplements a few years ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Nevertheless, some researchers wanted us to take even more calcium: “Americans are not meeting current calcium recommendations,” according to a 2007 article in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Continue Reading

The variability from day to day might alarm you if you manage your diabetes with one of the intermediate acting insulins. The problem could be that you aren’t mixing it well enough.

The type of insulin that we call NPH can take one to three hours to start working. But it lasts for 12 to 16 hours.

Its generic name is NPH; Novo Nordisk sells it as Novolin N and Lilly as Humulin N. NPH is also available premixed with short acting insulin.

But NPH insulin is itself a mixture, and that’s the problem. Its cloudy part is rich in insulin crystals while its clear part isn’t. Before you inject it, you have to mix these parts.

Continue Reading

Do you wonder why your doctor keeps telling you to take more and more drugs to manage your diabetes? Many people with diabetes take three or even more prescriptions for it every day.

A new article in the BMJ, which is the journal of the British Medical Association, reviewed the case of a British man who has had diabetes for 14 years and wondered if his stomach upset problems might be from the drugs he was taking for diabetes, cholesterol, high blood pressure, and coronary artery disease. He “asked if he could cut down on any if they weren’t all needed,” but didn’t want to jeopardize his diabetes control.

In the article by Doctors David Unwin and Simon Tobin, “A patient request for some ‘deprescribing’” they reported what happened next. They felt that “none of his drugs is essential — they have all been prescribed to reduce his risk of cardiovascular events and the complications of diabetes, not to treat an actual disease.” They appreciated that a better diet and more exercise were alternatives to the drugs.

Continue Reading

Do you take drugs? I’m asking mainly about the prescriptions that your doctor prescribed. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg for some of us.

It’s easy to forget to consider some of the drugs that you take. Of course you included your prescriptions, but did you remember to include those that you buy over the counter? Also, some people don’t realize that herbal supplements are drugs. When you include these sources, it’s not uncommon for some people with diabetes to be taking three or even more drugs for their condition.

Drugs in any of these categories have side effects, some of which nobody discovers until many people start taking them. For example, half a million people were taking the prescription diabetes drug Rezulin 15 years ago when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned it after at least 63 of us died from the liver failure that it caused.

Continue Reading

Everyone who has type 1 diabetes has to use insulin, and about 25 percent of the people who have type 2 diabetes rely on it to control their blood sugar. But its costs are skyrocketing and no end is in sight.

At the annual convention of the American Diabetes Association in Boston this June I listened with perhaps 1,000 other diabetes professionals to one of the world’s top experts on diabetes talk about insulin costs.  Irl Hirsch, MD, is the professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, also treats patients with diabetes, and has type 1 diabetes himself.

For several years, readers of my articles have written me to complain about the rising cost of insulin. Because I know how expensive that insulin has become, I made sure to hear Dr. Hirsch’s presentation. But I was surprised to see that he cited one of my articles in a slide that he presented.

Continue Reading