Lyxumia as add-on therapy to lantus aids glycemic control in type 2 diabetes, study finds

A randomized trial investigating the effect of adding lixisenatide (Lyxumia) to insulin glargine (Lantus) in type 2 diabetes patients has revealed that the regimen may achieve better glycemic control.
The LixiLan-O randomized trial, conducted by researchers from the Dallas Diabetes and Endocrine Center at Medical City, Texas, has found that mixed fixed-dose injection of glargine and lixisenatide leads to greater glycemic reductions than either component alone.
The findings, recently published in the journal Diabetes Care, also show that the combination with once-daily injectable GLP-1 receptor agonist lixisenatide presents no substantial side effect such as a high risk of hypoglycemia or significant weight gain.
Dr Julio Rosenstock and his colleagues have quantified the improvements in blood glucose control by measuring HbA1c values after 30 weeks of treatment with the combination strategy as well as insulin glargine or lixisenatide monotherapies.
The trial included 1170 patients that have had type 2 diabetes for at least eight years and who were assigned one of the three treatment options.
Most of the participants had trouble keeping their diabetes well controlled in check for three months prior to the study despite receiving metformin, with or without additional diabetes medications.
The combination treatment tested was administered once daily using pen injectors that contained different insulin concentrations.
The results demonstrated that significantly more patients (74 per cent) in the combination therapy group were able to reach a target HbA1c below 7% compared with those receiving either insulin (59 per cent) or lixisenatide (33 per cent) alone.
This also held true for an even lower HbA1c of 6.5%. And documented hypoglycemia was only slightly more elevated with the combination treatment (26%) than with glargine.
The researchers also noticed that unlike patients using the combination treatment, patients injecting themselves with just glargine gained 1.1 kg at the end of the experiment. In fact, the GlarLixi combo led to a modest weight loss of 0.3 kg.