Insulin-Boosting Medication Has No Impact on Patients' Ability to Survive Heart Attack

There has been a lot of concern expressed concerning a link between treatments for diabetes mellitus and heart attacks. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have released the results of the first ever large, population-based study that shows that commonly used medications for the treatment of diabetes mellitus do not reduce the rate of survival from heat attacks in the patients.

The drugs belong to a class called sulfonylureas and they increase the release of insulin. They include glimepiride (Amaryl), glipizide (Glucotrol, Glucotrol XL), and glyburide (DiaBeta, Micronase, Glynase)

Diabetes is one of the fastest growing diseases and world wide, it is expected that the number of diabetics will more than double from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million by the year 2030 and many of the diabetes patients are at an increased to develop heart failure. This can make the choice of treatments difficult for the physician and there has been concern about the effect that these medications have on the survival rate from the heart failure.

They used a special patient-records database that has been around since 1936 and they found all heart attacks that had occured in Olmsted County, Minn, when the clinic is based, and were able to identify a total of 2,732 heart attack patients who had an average age of 76, 56% of whom were women and 18% also had diabetes. They were split into three groups, one got the drugs, one the insulin and one just used diet modification.

The researchers did an evaluation of the outcome of heart attacks in two different groups, one being the diabetes patients, the other did not have diabetis. Both groups were similar in relation to age, gender and habits like smoking. In the diabetes group, they watched the outcome in the patients who were using three different therapies to control their blood sugar, one of the drugs, insulin or diet after they had a heart attack.

The results did not show any of the concerns that have been expressed about the impact of the drugs. They will give the physicians the guidance they need for managing the treatments for the diabetes patients.