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Jardiance, a newly approved diabetes drug, may also prevent heart attack, stroke and other unwanted cardiovascular events in diabetes patients, a recent study suggests.
Clinical trials showed that diabetes patients who already had a heart disease history were 38 percent less likely of having a stroke, heart attack, or heart failure event while they were taking their daily dose of Jardiance. Patients were monitored for three years.
Moreover, Jardiance users had a 35 percent lower risk of landing in a hospital after having a heart failure than participants in the control group. Plus, they had a 32 percent lower chance of dying of all causes.
The recent findings took the medical research community by storm after years of efforts of making diabetes medications safer and keep their side-effects to a minimum. Other diabetes drugs were also found effective in improving patients’ metabolic function, but none of them managed to actually reduce the rates of cardiovascular events and heart-related deaths.
On the contrary, some of those medications even increased the risk of dying from heart attack or stroke on the long run.
“It’s an amazing result, very unexpected and wonderful news,”
noted Dr. Christopher P. Cannon of the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Steven Nissen a Cleveland cardiologist, who urged the FDA on various occasions to keep a close watch on diabetes drugs because of cardiovascular disease concerns deemed, the new finding a “blockbuster result.” Jardiance is the first diabetes drug to actually reduce risk of cardiovascular events and deaths in diabetics.
The new drug helps the body eliminate excess blood sugar in diabetes patients through their urine. It was approved by the FDA in 2014, and it is now listed as one of the 40 approved drugs that can treat diabetes.
But its high price discouraged clinicians and patients alike. In the U.K. the National Health Service announced that it would cover for the entire cost of the drug – about $800 per year.
The recent findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and were presented Thursday during an annual meeting of European diabetes researchers in Stockholm, Sweden.
The study revealed that one in 39 diabetes patients with a history of heart disease could be saved from death with help from the new drug. Researchers noted that the effectiveness of the new medication in reducing risk of cardiovascular death was similar to that of statins, popular drugs used to lower bad cholesterol levels.
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