Re: Anyone use Byetta?
babbettes said:
i have been on byetta 5 for 3 weeks and going up to 10 at the weekend as im on insulin as well i inject into the top of my leg with a smaller needle it dosent hurt but ive had several bad hypos and lowering my insulin doses.
The specialist put me on Byetta with the insulin to see if my readings will come down and they have im just hoping i dont get any side effects with the 10 as i was fine on the lower dose .
Make sure you leave the injection in for the count of 5 or 6 and have it at least an hour before food .
Hi Babbettes,
As your specialist will no doubt have already told you, you will need to keep a very careful watch for hypos because Byetta encourages your pancreas to produce insulin, so you should need a lot less injected insulin. If you had no side effects with the 5mcg dose then it is unlikely that you will get them with the 10mcg.
I'm a bit concerned by your comment about injecting "at least an hour before food". The one hour figure is the absolute
maximum time, not the least time. Have a look at the patient information in this link (on page 2)
http://pi.lilly.com/us/byetta-ppi.pdf
You will see that the instructions are very clear that you must eat
WITHIN 60 minutes of injecting. The reason for this is because when we eat our body's insulin production comes in two phases. When we start to eat the stomach produces substances called incretins that tell the pancreas to start producing insulin. This is first phase insulin production.
Then as we digest the food, and the blood sugar goes up, the pancreas recognises the increase and starts to produce more insulin to deal with it. This is second phase production. Many type-2s don't have the first phase production, so the pancreas is very late in producing insulin in response to food, and often won't produce the appropriate amount. The result is blood sugar levels that just won't come down. This is where Byetta comes in. Byetta contains an incretin that is just like the ones produced by our bodies, and so the injection kicks off first phase production. The first phase production doesn't last very long and If you don't eat within that hour then the first phase production will have stopped and second phase won't be able to deal properly with whatever you eat.
When I was first put on Byetta 17 months ago I wanted to learn all I could about it and how it worked and I had some very long email and phone conversations with Eli Lilly staff both in the UK and their US head office. They were quite surprised that someone should take such an interest and were extremely helpful and encouraging. I learned a great deal from them, including lots of hints and tips that they don't include in the instruction leaflets, and am pleased to now be able to pass on that knowledge to the many new "lizard spit" users in the UK.
However, it does concern me that so many "specialists" are giving their patients information that simply shows that they haven't read either the patient information or, more importantly, the instructions for health professionals on what this drug does and how it should be used.
Just one other point that you may want to bring up with your specialist - if your BS levels are coming down and you are already experiencing hypos on the 5mcg dose then why on earth would you need to have the dose doubled!?! Again, the (apparently unread) instructions to health professionals are that the dose can be increased to 10mcg, but
only where the patient needs the higher dose.