Two drugs better than one to treat youth with type 2 diabetes

A combination of two diabetes drugs, metformin and rosiglitazone (the active ingredient of GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia, now virtually withdrawn from the market because of safety concerns), was more effective in treating youth with recent-onset type 2 diabetes than metformin alone, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found. Adding an intensive lifestyle intervention to metformin provided no more benefit than metformin therapy alone.

The study also found that metformin therapy alone was not an effective treatment for many of these youth. In fact, metformin had a much higher failure rate in study participants than has been reported in studies of adults treated with metformin alone.

The Treatment Options for type 2 Diabetes in Adolescents and Youth (TODAY) study is the first major comparative effectiveness trial for the treatment of type 2 diabetes in young people. TODAY was funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of NIH. The study results appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 29.