Diabetes
Diabetes symptoms can be so mild that many people don’t even know they have it. Those who are diagnosed may stop taking their pills, because they find the side effects worse than disease’s limited symptoms. But it’s important to take this disease seriously because over time untreated or poorly treated…
✅ This article was reviewed and approved by Terry Graedon, member of our MedShadow Medical Advisory Board. When Ron Carlson died on his motorcycle at 66, it wasn’t a slippery road or a distracted driver that led to his demise. It was hypoglycemia, according to the medical examiner who reviewed…
Over the past decade, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has initiated or supported recalls on a handful of drugs, including metformin, ranitidine (Zantac), angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARB) (valsartan, losartan and irbesartan), varenicline (Chantix), rifampin (Rifadin) and rifapentine (Priftin) — which treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and other conditions,…
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now approved the diabetes drug Wegovy (semaglutide), previously okayed for diabetes, for weight loss. I wonder why? I was the consumer representative on the FDA advisory panel that voted to approve Wegovy (semaglutide) for diabetes. I voted for it reluctantly and only because…
The more raw fruits and vegetables you eat, the more your body rejects the things that are not good for it. On this episode of Power to the Patient, Dr. Lillie Rosenthal sits down with health coach Samantha Salmon from Los Angeles, CA. As a black woman of Jamaican heritage,…
Carol Gee had been using two different types of insulin injections as well as a pill to control her blood sugar successfully. Then her insurance company told her doctor they’d no longer cover the combination of drugs unless the doctor could show that no other options were suitable. When she…
From alcohol, to over-the-counter meds and herbal supplements, find out what substances and scenarios people with diabetes need to be aware of. If you have diabetes, you probably know all about how food affects your blood sugar, including what, when, how often and how much you eat. Skipping meals, for…
Good morning, all. We hope you’re hanging tough and that your week is off to a splendid start. As for the news cycle — things could be better. A new study on a medication used to treat COVID-19 contradicts its efficacy, and another pharmaceutical company recalled a batch of Metformin….
A petition was filed on June 24 that called for a black box warning for SGLT-2 inhibitors that are being prescribed for off-label used. The diabetes drug metformin is having a moment, as it may help stop COVID-19 deaths. And a cavalier and rebellious attitude in younger folks who think…
In a major and concerning diabetes drug recall, the FDA has asked five companies to recall their versions of extended-release metformin. They are: Apotex – All lots Amneal – All lots Marksans (labeled as Time-Cap) – One lot (XP9004) Lupin – One lot (G901203) Teva (labeled as Actavis) – 14 …
The FDA has issued a recall of two drugs–NP Thyroid and Metformin–after testing revealed that they weren’t up to code. Read more below, and if you’re taking either medication, please be sure to contact your doctor for how to continue treatment responsibly. NP Thyroid Recalled Thirteen lots of NP Thyroid,…
Just released from the FDA – Pfizer has informed the FDA that they are aware of several continuing problems that people are having using the EpiPen (epinephrine) and EpiPen Jr (epinephrine) auto-injectors and generic versions. Some of the problems are from user error and some from EpiPen malfunction. Here are…
Supplements are sold without review or approval of the FDA. They are not allowed to make specific health claims, but general ones, such as “improves well-being” and “boosts energy” are legal. That leaves the door open for unscrupulous, or careless, manufacturers. The FDA also does not regulate the manufacturers recommended…
Health experts say the little-used benefit of personal nutritional counseling represents a lost opportunity for those with diabetes to improve their health — and for the program to save money by preventing costly complications from the diseases.
This week in the news: Weed and pregnancy, Vitamin D during pregnancy and fewer cavities in babies, and Vitamin D for treating diabetes.
Is your Type 2 Diabetes really Type 1? Are “Z” drugs causing unusual, dangerous behavior? Can music help stroke victims?
“Long story short, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the emergency room. I don’t really remember what happened. I only remember a nurse struggling to put in an IV line. My A1c was a whopping 14 and was warned that if I didn’t take control of my life I would be a repeat customer.”
Nearly one-third of all patients will stop taking a prescription medication without even telling their doctor. There are a variety of reasons people stop taking medications that have been prescribed for them. Sometimes they don’t think they need to take the medicine, or think it isn’t working. Maybe they’ve heard…
A diabetes drug may also help people with kidney disease by reducing the risk of experiencing kidney failure. The drug, Invokana (canagliflozin), is known as an SGLT2 inhibitor. In a new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease taking Invokana and…
Your doctor has just prescribed you a diabetes medication. Here’s how they work to reduce blood glucose levels and what to be aware of while taking them. At a recent visit to the doctor’s office, I had blood drawn for a number of lab tests, including ones to detect diabetes….
The FDA is warning that a rare genital infection may be linked to a class of diabetes medications. From March 2013 to May 2018, the agency said it received word of 12 cases of Fournier’s gangrene – a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection of tissue under the skin around the genitals…
Taking into account a person’s sex and BMI (body mass index) can help health care providers not only provide the diabetes medications most likely to be most effective, but can also minimize side effects. While patients with type 2 diabetes are usually given metformin to start, many of them do…
By Diane Archer JustCareUSA.org A recent article in NEJM Catalyst describes a new disease management trial at Geisinger Health System. Geisinger is testing providing free food to patients with diabetes who were not eating a balanced diet, as a medicine. It recognizes that a good diet can be better than…
Switching from metformin – the standard drug treatment for type 2 diabetes – to sulfonylureas – a second-line treatment for diabetes – can increase the risk of major side effects, such as heart attack and stroke, a new study suggests. Common sulfonylureas include Amaryl (glimepiride), Glucotrol (glipizide) and DiaBeta (glyburide). Researchers…
Diabetics who are dependent on insulin have to pay $1,000 a month, on average, for insulin and supplies. That’s ridiculous for a drug whose patent was sold 97 years ago. Now patients are fighting back to cut insulin costs. Have you heard about the insulin crisis? Diabetics who are dependent…
The ‘Sugar Daddy’ episode is in ‘collaboration’ with Novo-Nordisk – maker of diabetes drugs – and minimizes the ways diet and exercise can help diabetics. Do you like the TV show black-ish? I do. It’s funny, and the acting is outstanding. But even better, every week the show uses its…
An article in the journalDiabetes, Obesity and Metabolism reports that 30% of diabetic patients who are prescribed metformin do not take the medication because of its side effects. Researchers from the University of Surrey set out to see how likely patients were to take their medication by analyzing database information…
An oral drug for type 2 diabetes worked just as well as the injectable version in controlling blood sugar and helping with weight loss. Researchers from the University of Leicester Diabetes Research Centre in England discovered that oral semaglutide, which is taken once daily, resulted in better glycemic control than…
People who are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes may increase that risk by taking a statin medication over the long term. Statins are cholesterol-lowering medications, though they are also given to people thought to be susceptible to diabetes to help head off cardiovascular disease and to lower…
The real hope is to find a drug that lowers blood sugar, weight and cardiovascular risk. This drug comes close, but is it safe for everyone? Last week I sat on an FDA panel as the lone Consumer Rep to discuss and vote on an application for a diabetes drug,…
Researchers from the University of Maryland examined the medical claims of nearly 120,000 patients between the ages of 5 and 20 years old who were using antidepressants. The team compared incident cases of diabetes among the young patients using antidepressants — patients who didn’t discontinue the medications for more than…
A stringent program of diet and exercise did help study participants lower their meds. Could a less rigorous program work equally well? Many type 2 diabetics find that glucose-lowering medication is difficult to tolerate. These drugs have multiple potential adverse drug interactions, they are expensive, they cause discomfort and generally…
A new study demonstrates that a relatively new and popular diabetes drug, Invokana (canagliflozin), also has cardiovascular benefits, such as reducing the risk of heart attacks, but at a serious cost – an increased risk of leg and foot amputation. Conducted by Invokana’s manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceutical, results showed that patients…
The newest class of diabetes drugs on the market may increase a patient’s risk for developing a serious complication of the disease that can potentially be fatal. Researchers found that type 2 diabetes patients taking SGLT2 inhibitors – which include Farxiga (dapagliflozin), Invokana (canagliflozin) and Jardiance (empagliflozin) – were twice…
Patients Taking Invokana Have an Increased Risk of Leg and Foot Amputations The FDA reports that the type 2 diabetes medicine Invokana (canagliflozin) causes an increased risk of leg and foot amputations. Two large clinical trials showed that leg and foot amputations occurred about twice as often in patients treated…
If you’ve been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, losing weight, exercising and changes in diet could be enough to keep your blood sugar in check. A combination of diet and exercise has the ability to reverse diabetes in many diabetics and pre-diabetics who are not insulin dependent — meaning if…
A popular class of drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes may increase the risk of bile duct and gallbladder disease. The class, GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1) receptor agonists, is given via an injection and includes Byetta (exenatide), Victoza (liraglutide) and Trulicity (dulaglutide). Health records of more than 1.5 million…
People with diabetes have a multitude of drug options to keep their blood sugar in check from cheap generics that have been around for decades to newer drugs that are pricey to say the least. But the newer drugs are no better at cutting the risk of heart disease, stroke…
A new class of diabetes drugs that has been available for a little over three years have become immensely popular with doctors and patients, even though the pills have a host of adverse events and risks. The first SGLT2 (first sodium-glucose cotransporter-2) inhibitor to hit the market, back in 2013,…
People who take an opioid medication for pain are at a higher risk for heart problems. Patients prescribed an opioid painkiller had a 64% higher risk of early death compared to patients given an another type of pain med, researchers reported in JAMA. Much of the increased risk was connected…
Many people who have diabetes, particularly seniors, are so aggressively treated for the condition with many drugs that it may be putting them at risk for dangerously low blood sugar levels. Researchers examined data on more than 31,000 adults with type 2 diabetes. About 20% of those studied were considered…
People taking the diabetes medication Invokana may be at risk for leg and foot amputations. The FDA is alerting the public about interim safety results from an ongoing clinical trial that found an increase in the amputations, mostly affecting the toes, in patients taking Invokana (canagliflozin). The FDA has not…
Metformin, one of the most popular drugs prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes that has been available as a generic for many years, is safer for the heart than many newer -– and more expensive -– drugs, according to a new analysis. The findings, published in the Annals of Internal…
Taking the blood thinner warfarin at the same time as certain diabetes drugs increases the risk of hospitalization, a study from the University of Southern California warns. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 466,000 Medicare patients. They found that those who took warfarin along with the diabetes drugs glipizide or glimepiride…
Losing a single gram of fat could be enough to reverse the symptoms of type 2 diabetes – as long as that fat comes from the pancreas, researchers in the UK have shown. The study followed 18 obese participants with type 2 diabetes both before and after gastric bypass surgery….
Over the past 7 years, the number of new diabetes cases reported has dropped, and by a substantial number. According to the NYTimes, “The rate of new cases fell by about a fifth from 2008 to 2014, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the first…
Novo Nordisk announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Tresiba for the treatment of diabetes mellitus in adults after review of the class II resubmissions of the New Drug Application (NDA). Via Drugs.com. Posted September 25, 2015. –Alanna McCatty
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a safety alert that some widely used treatments for Type 2 diabetes can cause severe and disabling joint pain, raising concerns for a big-selling class of drugs. The FDA alert applies to a category of pills known as DPP-IV inhibitors, which…
Six commonly used drugs—statins, antacids, oral contraceptives, antidepressants, diabetes drugs and antibiotics—can have serious side effects. These drugs can deplete the body of certain nutrient levels and lead to chronic diseases. Via Medical Daily. Posted August 6, 2015. –Alanna McCatty
The FDA warned that a widely used newer class of type 2 diabetes drugs sold by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly in partnership with Boehringer Ingleheim may lead to ketoacidosis, a serious condition where the body produces high levels of blood acids called ketones. Via Newsmax Health. Posted…
A new study finds the diabetes drug metformin doesn’t help patients with a type of pancreatic cancer, as evidence formerly suggested. Researchers examined the medical records of 1,360 patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, some of whom took metformin. The median number of survival days for those who didn’t take the…
AstraZeneca Plc’s diabetes drug Onglyza may be associated with an increased rate of death, according to a preliminary review of data by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A trial of more than 16,000 patients known as SAVOR previously showed that patients taking Onglyza, also known as saxagliptin, had an…
According to a study reported in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, patients who manage type 2 diabetes with drugs that lower glucose or blood sugar may be at higher risk for heart failure. Results showed that 95,000 randomly selected patients who took new or more intensive blood sugar-lowering drugs, or…
Many drugs used to treat diabetes are approved by the FDA using surrogate endpoints, causing serious side effects. Surrogate endpoints: If you think that sounds like medical mumbo jumbo, keep reading. For some people with diabetes, medications that were approved based on surrogate endpoints may lead to serious side effects….
A new study suggest that drop-offs in compliance with diabetes medication might negatively affect survival and could therefore partly explain the established higher cancer mortality seen among diabetes patients with worse glycemic control, according to the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organization. Via Medscape Medical News. Posted January 29, 2015. –Alanna McCatty
Diabetes drugs that promote the release of insulin from the pancreas can in some cases cause side effects due to their actions on other organs. To help create better drugs, researchers at Imperial College London and LMU Munichadapted an existing type of drug called a sulfonylurea so that it changes…
New research shows promising evidence that a modified form of a different drug, niclosamide – which eliminate intestinal parasites – may hold the key to battling type 2 diabetes. Victor Shengkan Jin, an associate professor of pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, found that niclosamide ethanolamine salt (NEN)…
In the latest study, researchers at McGill University in Montreal found that Metformin, a commonly used drug to treat type-2 diabetes, increases the risk of low thyroid-stimulating hormone level in patients with underactive thyroids. In this study, 74,300 patients were given either Metformin or sulfonylurea, over a 25-year study period. In…
“When you block the calcium-dependent membrane function in your gut with the drug metformin (used for diabetes), you lower vitamin B12 levels. A deficiency of B12 is well-documented. It can cause painful neuropathies. This answers the “why” question in case you have more numbness or pins and needles in your…
The link might be coincidental, but a recent review of studies indicates that many people who use antidepressants go on to develop diabetes. NursingInPractice.org and several other sites reported on a University of Southampton (UK) review of 22 studies. Causation has not been established, but antidepressants cause weight gain which…
Dr. Sanjay Guptareports on a study that showed many benefits of losing weight even though improved heart health was not one of them. In a study, that seems flawed from our reading, the focus was to lower heart attacks in diabetics through weight loss. Since that direct correlation wasn’t established,…
I just saw a thought-provoking “TedTalks” by Peter Attia, MD, about diabetes and obesity. Please take time to watch it. I can’t do justice to it, but he is challenging the accepted thinking about weight, insulin and diabetes. We know insulin resistance leads to diabetes. We assume the overweight leads…
