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Diabetes drug cuts repeat heart attacks: study

Posted on: Wednesday, 16 November 2005, 11:56 CST

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.

Source: REUTERS

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