Actos arrests heart disease in diabetics: study

The popular diabetes pill Actos prevented the build-up of fatty deposits in heart arteries in a study of patients with type 2 diabetes, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said the drug Actos (also called pioglitazone) is the first diabetes therapy shown to reduce the progression of Atherosclerosis.

“The results are very striking. In my view, this is really a breakthrough study,” study chief Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic said in an interview.

“Keep in mind the leading cause of death for diabetics is cardiovascular disease,” said Nissen, whose findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago.

The study compared two types of medications to treat type 2 diabetes - Actos and an older diabetes drug called glimepiride.

Actos is in a class of drugs known as thiazolidinediones, a relatively new group of antidiabetic agents that are known to raise the risk of heart failure and bone fractures.

In the current study, Nissen and colleagues compared the two drugs to see how well they reduced progression of Atherosclerosis in 543 patients with type 2 diabetes and coronary disease.

While plaque increased 0.73 percent in the glimepiride group, it fell 0.16 percent in the pioglitazone group.

The researchers also looked at maximum plaque thickness and saw it increased in the glimepiride group and decreased in the pioglitazone group.

Nissen said a single study is not enough to change medical practice, but it does signal the need for more research on how different diabetes drugs stack up.

Dr. Salim Yusuf of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, however, noted that patients in the study who took Actos did have a significant number of fractures. “This suggests there may be differences in drugs. We need to test that,” Yusuf said.