Diabetes drug cuts repeat heart attacks: study

By Ransdell Pierson and Bill Berkrot

DALLAS (Reuters) – A diabetes drug sold by Takeda
Pharmaceutical Co. and Eli Lilly and Co. significantly cut the
rate of a second heart attack compared with a placebo in
high-risk patients with type-2 diabetes, a study reported on
Wednesday found.

The data come from a secondary analysis of a failed trial
of the drug Actos reported in September, which had a more
ambitious main goal of preventing a wide range of adverse heart
events, including death, stroke, heart attack and the need to
clear clogged leg and heart arteries in high-risk type-2
diabetics.

The data presented at the American Heart Association annual
scientific meeting show that Actos, also known as pioglitazone,
reduced the risk of repeat heart attacks, both fatal and
non-fatal, by 28 percent, according to researchers who
conducted the 2,445-patient study.

“This is the first glucose-lowering drug shown to prevent
additional heart attacks,” said the study’s lead author, Dr.
Erland Erdmann of the University of Koeln in Germany.

Erdmann said diabetics have many times the risk of heart
attack as the general population and that based on this
analysis, “doctors probably will prefer pioglitazone (Actos)
over other drugs, such as metformin or even insulin” to prevent
a recurrent heart attack.

Patients in the study received either Actos in addition to
their regular diabetes medicine or placebo on top of their
normal treatment.

The results also showed a 19 percent reduction in a
composite of adverse heart events, including non-fatal heart
attacks, the need for heart artery-clearing procedures, acute
coronary syndrome and cardiac death, researchers said.

The new analysis excluded stroke, amputations, total deaths
and leg artery-clearing procedures, which had contributed to
the original trial’s failure.

After Actos failed to achieve statistical significance in
the original study, researchers went back and took a closer
look at the data to see if the drug might have helped prevent
new heart attacks among patients in the original study.