Once-a-week insulin treatment could be a novel way to take care of diabetes
About 34.2 millionTrusted Source people in america, roughly 10.5% of the population, have diabetes.
And around 7.4 million persons in the U.S. with diabetes use an insulin formula to greatly help control their blood sugar.
Insulin is a hormone that the pancreas produces to greatly help transport sugar from the blood into cells. For a person with diabetes, either their body will not produce enough insulin, or it cannot put it to use efficiently.
Using insulin is a powerful treatment, but the injections can be difficult to manage and painful, and some think it is embarrassing. These and other barriers will keep people from using the medication properly or at all.
To lessen these obstacles, researchers around the world are looking for more patient-friendly means of delivering insulin. Recently, a team from the U.S., Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Poland, Belgium, and Italy tested the efficacy and safety of a fresh injectable type of insulin used only once a week.
The findings of the team’s two studies indicate that the brand new injectable could be a viable option for people currently injecting insulin once a day or even more often.
The studies come in the journal Diabetes Care.
Current insulin therapies
To be able to inject insulin, a person currently must gauge how much of the medication to use predicated on their blood sugar levels. These vary, depending on the number of carbohydrates in the diet, the volume of exercise, and degrees of stress.
Overall, the injections are complicated. According to a 2016 studyTrusted Source, for example, many participants who used insulin often made errors involving the dose or injection site.
And mistakes can lead toTrusted Source serious complications, including high or low blood sugar and diabetic ketoacidosis, which can be fatal.
Researchers have made advances in insulin remedy over the past few decades, and they continue steadily to explore new options for effective and safe insulin delivery.
Toward a less burdensome injectable
The two new trials assessed the safety and efficacy of a modified version of insulin called insulin icodec.
This has an extended half-life, roughly 196 hours, which makes it ideal as a once-a-week treatment. Half-life identifies the time that it requires the body to metabolicly process and excrete half of the original dose of a medication.
Both of the studies were phase 2 trials. These can include 100-300 participants with the same health-related issue who receive doses and use or undergo treatment options demonstrated to be safe in earlier phase 1 studies.
In both of the brand new trials, every participant was also taking an oral glucose-reducing medication that was not insulin, such as metformin. The studies were then randomized, which ensures that the participants were randomly assigned to get further doses and medications.
Both were also open-label trialsTrusted Source, which ensures that the researchers and participants knew what treatments these were using.
Each study was conducted slightly differently and included varying amounts of participants with type 2 diabetes who were from different countries.
One study included 205 participants, from the U.S., Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Croatia, and Slovakia, who weren't currently using insulin.
In this trial, the participants were screened for 14 days, received treatment for 16 weeks, and followed up for 5 weeks. The analysis tested three ways of adjusting and optimizing insulin dosage. The goal was to see which lowered blood sugar levels the most while avoiding them from dipping too low.
The other study included 154 participants, from the U.S., Canada, Czechia, Italy, and Germany, who already use insulin. The researchers followed them for 23 weeks to evaluate how better to transition from daily to weekly insulin injections.
Both studies discovered that insulin icodec was just as effectual as the commonly used daily insulin glargine injections.
The researchers also found that transitioning from a daily injectable type of insulin to a weekly insulin icodec injection was safe and well-tolerated.
Furthermore, participants who used a double dose of insulin icodec as their first injection reached optimal glucose target levels faster than those that did not.
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
