Stop prescribing diabetes drug, scientists say

Wed, 19 Aug 2009
According to diabetes news reports, top scientists are calling for doctors to stop prescribing a common diabetes drug . Research reportedly linked the diabetic drug to higher incidences of heart failure and death.

A pharmacologist and lead author of the research, David Juurlink, claimed that the drug should be terminated. The researchers looked at almost 40,000 diabetes patients aged 66 or older. For every 93 patients treated with rosiglitazone, one extra heart failure or death would occur each year.

Dr. Juurlink reportedly commented: "As a clinician, I cannot envision an instance in which I would recommend rosiglitazone over pioglitazone. My logic for recommending that rosiglitazone no longer be used is several-fold: there is an increasing body of evidence that rosiglitazone is associated with more harm than pioglitazone, there is biological plausibility to support this (outlined in our paper – rosiglitazone is a more potent stimulus for salt and water retention in the kidney ) and not a single study, to my knowledge, has suggested that pioglitazone might be less safe than rosiglitazone. Importantly, rosiglitazone has not a single advantage – not even a theoretical one – over pioglitazone."

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