Changing Dietary Habits

I've had type 2 diabetes for 23 years now. When I was diagnosed, the only treatments available were sulfonylureas, metformin (which had only been approved here the year before), or insulin. And the cutoff for a diagnosis of diabetes was a fasting blood glucose (BG) level of 140 mg/dL.

Since then, myriad drugs have come on the market, including the glitazones, glutides, gliptins,  gliflozins, and meglitinides. A real tongue-twister.

Examples of these newer drugs are Actos (glitazone, or thiazolidinedione); Victoza (glutide; GLP-1 agonist); Januvia (gliptin; DPP-4 inhibitor), Invokana; (gliflozin; SGLT-2 inhibitor), and Starlix (meglitinide; long-acting sulfonylurea). Some of them are available as combinations with other diabetes drugs. Some are injectable and others are pills. Some last a week and others just a day or less.

You can find a more complete list here.

Some of these drugs can cause weight gain and others can contribute to weight loss. Some are supposed to protect the heart and some seem to increase rates of heart disease. Some increase rates of pancreatitis. Other side effects include nausea, urinary tract infections, ketoacidosis, and even lower-limb amputation.

Clearly, deciding which medications are best for you depends on many factors, and different physicians have different preferences. However, today most agree that metformin is the best drug to start with unless you can't tolerate it because of GI side effects.

But despite all the new drugs, one treatment remains the same as when I was diagnosed: diet and exercise. At first, this treatment is the most difficult of all.

We'd all like to be able to take a pill and continue eating what we've always eaten, including, in almost all cases, more food than our body needs. This is not entirely our fault. Portions at restaurants are often huge, and tempting treats are offered everywhere. We've usually been raised to clean our plates and not waste food. But if we want to be healthy, we need a major brain reshuffle to reject old ideas and acquire new ones.

What works for me is a low-carb diet, and I think that's the best one to start with. If for some reason, it doesn't work for you, then you can try to find another diet that works for you. But controlling our food intake, no matter how, is essential. Exercise is good for the heart but usually has less effect on blood glucose levels than diet does.

The most difficult thing facing you when diagnosed, I think, is accepting the fact that you're going to have to revamp your eating habits, usually in a major way. You have diabetes, and it's not going to go away. It can be controlled, but not cured, at least not today. It's difficult to accept this at first, but it's necessary if you want to live a long and healthy life.

That's bad news, but here's some good news. One study showed that people with diabetes who take metformin actually live longer, on average, than people who don't have diabetes. This doesn't mean you can take metformin and not change your dietary habits. But it is consistent with the saying that the best way to stay healthy is to develop a chronic disease that forces you to take care of yourself.

So instead of raging against our fate, we should be grateful that fate has given us a second chance. Let's use it to stay healthy for many more years to come.

The Glimins

There's a new class of diabetes medications on the horizen, not yet approved by the FDA. They're called glimins, and the one that has had the most research is imeglimin. Results of Phase 3 trials in Japan were reported at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Barcelona in September.

Phase 1 trials test the safety of a new drug in a small number of healthy volunteers. Phase 2 trials test the efficacy of the drug in more people. Phase 3 trials test even more people in what are usually blinded studies (meaning neither the patient nor the physicians know which patients got the drug and which got a placebo). Once a drug has passed Phase 3, the company can apply for FDA approval.

One problem with the glimin class is that there's already a generic drug on the market called Glimin. It seems to be a sulfonylurea or a sulfonylurea plus metformin. It's marketed in Asia, and perhaps the term glimin is used there to mean diabetes drug as there seem to be different formulations. As far as I know, none of these products are available in the United States. But there could still be confusion.

The drug imeglimin is reported to work via the mitochondria to affect several systems important for glucose control: decrease the release of glucose by the liver, increase the uptake of glucose by muscle, increase insulin secretion, and decrease the destruction of beta cells by apoptosis (a way the body gets rid of cells it thinks it doesn't need). It may also mobilize fat in the liver.

The exact mechanism by which imeglimin works is not yet known, but metformin was used for years before it was known how it worked, and the mechanism is still not completely understood.

The reports of imeglimin sound wonderful, but there's very little information about the new drug available yet. And side effects of new medications often don't emerge until thousands of people have taken the drugs. So this information doesn't have much immediate practical use. There were reports on its benefits in 2012 and it's still not on the market. However, knowing a little about it means that if there are news stories about it, you can understand their relevance.