If Sugar Doesn’t Kill You, Avandia Might

Every time I go to the supermarket, I can smell the baked goods being freshly prepared in the bakery. That inviting smell makes my mouth water and brings feelings of joy, happiness as well as memories of family meals. All my sense have been kicked into high alert just from the bakery department. Once I clear my head and settle down, I remember that I need to keep my sweet tooth in check. One of the main reasons is that my father has been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I have to be careful not to fall into the same trap.

Whenever we eat anything, we can see that food enters our mouths, into our stomachs, down through our intestines and out the back. If we look into our stomachs, our body breaks down the sugars and starches we eat into a simple sugar called glucose. Glucose is a basic component used for energy and stored as fat. Insulin is a hormone made by the pancreas, which allows the body to use glucose. The cells in your body need sugar for energy. However, sugar cannot go into most of your cells directly. As your blood sugar level rises, the pancreas releases insulin into your bloodstream. Insulin then attaches to and signals cells to absorb sugar from the bloodstream. The goal is to keep a sugar balance in your bloodstream. You never want your sugar level to get too high (hyperglycemia) or too low (hypoglycemia).

There are several classifications of diabetes (#diabetes) but there are two main types. The first is Type 1 diabetes (juvenile diabetes) which is usually diagnosed in children and young adults. In type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce insulin.  So the cells are never alerted to absorb glucose. With the help of insulin, children can regulate their blood sugar and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes which leads to adult diabetes and affecting millions. If you have type 2 diabetes your body does not use insulin properly which is called insulin resistance. At first, your pancreas makes extra insulin, but over time it isn’t able to keep up and can’t make enough insulin to keep your blood glucose at normal levels. A person has to learn how to strike a balance between adding insulin or watching sugar intake. To assist with insulin resistance, drugs called thiazolidinediones or glitazones were designed to act as insulin sensitizers. This allows patients with Type 2 diabetes to become more sensitive to insulin and maintain a proper sugar balance.

We are going to focus on Avandia (rosiglitazone) for treatment of Type 2 diabetes. What is Avandia?  It is an oral diabetes medication that acts as an insulin sensitizer to help control blood sugar levels. Avandia works by attaching itself to receptors in fat cells to make them more responsive to insulin. It is a great attempt to treat the disease but it has serious side effects.

Avandia Side Effects

There were three main glitazones created for treatment. You had Avandia (rosiglitazone), Rezulin (troglitazone) and Actos (pioglitazone).  All three drugs have had serious side effects associated with its use. Rezulin was recalled in 2000, after it was shown to cause liver damage. Actos is still around but has been shown to have an increased risk of heart failure and bladder cancer. Avandia, was initially approved by the FDA in 1999 but as new information came out on its use, there was a strong link to heart attacks, strokes  and heart failures. There are the milder side effects for Avandia which include headache, back pain, flu like symptoms, nausea, shortness of breath, easy bruising and bleeding and loss of appetite.

Avandia was created by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with a good intention of helping treat diabetes. Along the way information  was found from the company’s clinical trials of Avandia that revealed only mild side effects, including upper respiratory tract infection, headache, back pain, hyperglycemia, fatigue and sinusitis. In those clinical trials, there also was a significant increase in the risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack). They failed to notify doctors of the increased risks and put their patients at risk.

Once word got out, guess who came to the table? The lawyers lined up and sued GSK. There was an Avandia settlement provided back in 2011 for failure to inform patients about potentially life-threatening symptoms, including stroke, heart failure, heart attack, bone fractures, vision loss and death.  It was so bad that in 2010, regulators stopped Avandia sales in Europe because of the increased heart risks and a black box warning was issued for use of Avandia in the US. They paid $3 billion dollar penalty to the justice department and $6.4 billion was set aside for the more than 50,000 lawsuits filed.

Have you suffered from using Avandia?