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| |  Liraglutide Improves Glucose Control, Increases Weight Loss in Type 2 Diabetes Patients LONDON -- September 24, 2008 -- Liraglutide, a new treatment for type 2 diabetes, improves blood glucose control compared with a conventional oral treatment, glimepiride. Patients given liraglutide injections also recorded increases in weight loss and decreases in blood pressure. These are the conclusions of an article Dr Alan Garber, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA, and colleagues, published online today in The Lancet. In this randomized, controlled phase III trial, 746 patients with early type 2 diabetes were assigned to once-daily liraglutide 1.2 mg (251 patients) or 1.8 mg (247 patients), or to once-daily glimepiride 8 mg (248 patients) for 1 year. The primary outcome was the change in proportion of glycosylated haemoglobin (Hb A1c). Patients in the 3 groups had a mean Hb A1c of 8.3-8.4% at baseline. The researchers found that Hb A1c decreased by 0.51% in the glimepiride group, while in the liraglutide 1.2-mg group the reduction was 0.84% and in the liraglutide 1.8-mg group it was 1.14%. Proportions of patients achieving Hb A1c of both <7.0% and <6.5% (2 internationally accepted targets) were higher for both liraglutide group patients than for glimepiride patients; these results were seen in those patients who had been receiving treatment before and those who were treatment-naive. Five patients in the liraglutide 1.2-mg group, 1 in the 1.8-mg group, and none in the glimepiride group discontinued treatment because of vomiting. Further, the researchers found that participants in the liraglutide groups lost weight (around 2 kg), while those in the glimepiride group gained weight (1 kg), when adjusted for the e€ects of nausea. Systolic blood pressure fell by 0.7 mm Hg in the glimepiride group, compared with 2.1 mg Hg in the liraglutide 1.2-mg group and 3.6 mm Hg in the liraglutide 1.8-mg group. These blood pressure results were only statistically signi€cant for the liraglutide 1.8-mg group vs glimepiride. The authors conclude: "Treatment with liraglutide as monotherapy provided better glycaemic control for 52-weeks than did glimepiride, a traditional €rst-line therapy for type 2 diabetes mellitus, in participants previously treated with either diet and exercise or oral antidiabetic monotherapy. Liraglutide improved glycaemic control with a low rate of hypoglycaemia.... On the basis of these results, we conclude that liraglutide is safe and e€ective as initial pharmacological therapy for type 2 diabetes mellitus and has advantages over other drugs used in monotherapy, such as greater reductions in weight, the number of hypoglycaemic events, and systolic blood pressure." SOURCE: The Lancet
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