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Revealing now that this diabetes drug may be linked to pancreatitis just takes away any bit of trust I had in these drug companies and agencies that empower them. We may remember the announcement about Januvia in 2006. It was dubbed "the first in a new class of diabetes drugs."
The release statement back then stated the FDA's approval of the drug and it's side effects and noted that, "The most common side effects in clinical studies were upper respiratory tract infection, sore throat, and diarrhea." Now we may be finding out that wasn't all. Scary.
Also scary is the realization that so many type 2 diabetics trust these new concoctions more than traditionally natural methods which can give added control and lesses (and even break) their dependence on these drugs. We should have expected to learn that Januvia heals the pancreas, instead the potential is there that it can make us more diabetic!
The DPP-4 gene is a known tumor suppressor, known to be active against melanoma, prostate cancer, lung cancer and ovarian cancer. No research has been done to learn if suppressing DPP-4 over time leads to cancer, but the researchers who work with DPP-4 and cancer who I've asked about this say it is a valid concern that has never been addressed in the drug testing.
Dr. Mark Goldstein published a letter in Archives of Internal Medicine citing evidence in the Januvia clinical trials suggesting it was increasing the rate of cancers even in the very short time those trials covered.
This is the next ticking timbbomb, as serious as the problems that came out with Avandia. And like the problems with Avandia, the drug will probably be on the market for a decade before the truth comes out. If it comes out.
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historically, any drug which caused cancer in animals would be witheld from the market- that is why saccharin had a long hiatus, because some rat fed its entire body weight in saccharin got cancer- but interestingly, the impetus to put saccharin on the market was via public demand (however engineered)- so there is no analogy to the 'me-too' drugs, where there would not be sufficient public demand, since the option would be to take the 'me' drug- as far as efficacy, insulin, the SUs and metformin signifigantly outstrip results of the incretin mimetic classes- seems to me the onus then would be on the drug companies to provide further workup evidence of the effects of these drugs on the human pancreas before being marketed as safe- primary efficacy drugs may be expedited, but me-too drugs should have a more rigorous record of safety