Diabetes drug Actos reduces risk of Type 2
Study funded by maker Takeda Pharmaceuticals
LOS ANGELES – Taking the diabetes drug Actos every day reduced the chance of developing Type 2 diabetes by two-thirds in people whose obesity, ethnicity, family history and other factors put them at high risk of developing the disease, researchers said Wednesday.
In a study of more than 600 high-risk patients, only 2.1 percent of those who took Actos, known generically as pioglitazone, progressed to diabetes each year over the three years of the study, compared with 7.6 percent of those who took a placebo, according to the report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
All of the patients selected for the trial had a condition called prediabetes in which the body’s ability to control blood sugar levels is already impaired, although not to the level that would constitute diabetes.
“The ability to intervene at a prediabetic state before we become diabetic and become at risk for complications is extremely important,” said Dr. Ralph A. DeFronzo of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, lead author of the study.
The study was sponsored by the drug’s maker, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and conducted by researchers at eight academic centers.
About 27 million Americans are diabetic and about 79 million have prediabetes, according to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in three of those who have prediabetes will progress to diabetes without intervention.
Many interventions have been attempted. The diabetes drug metformin reduces progression to diabetes by about 31 percent. Lifestyle changes and dieting reduce it by about 58 percent. Rosiglitazone, sold under the brand-name Avandia, has been shown to reduce progression by 62 percent, but because of cardiac concerns, the Food and Drug Administration has restricted use of the drug to patients who cannot achieve control of blood sugars by any other method.
Actos reduced progression to diabetes by 72 percent, according to the study.
Only gastric bypass surgery would be more effective than Actos, but it has not been studied in prediabetes.