Diabetes drugs don’t fight inflammation
Two popular treatments lower blood sugar but may not prevent heart disease
Tightly controlling blood sugar in people with diabetes doesn’t relieve inflammation that can lead to heart disease, a new study shows.
A study of 500 people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes shows that a drug called metformin and a once-daily injection of insulin are both effective in controlling blood sugar levels. But the drugs, either alone or in combination, don’t lower levels of three markers of inflammation any more than a placebo does, Aruna Pradhan, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues report in the Sept. 16 Journal of the American Medical Association.