Study reveals type 2 diabetes patients are on a higher risk of developing fractures who tend to use insulin or sulfonylurea as compared to those who take metformin.
The team of researchers led by Kong pointed out that diabetic patients who are dependent on anti-diabetic medications are long suspected to be on an increased risk of having fractures.
But after going through a series of studies, they came to know that evidence of such effects are limited and depend on certain other conditions.
Insulin Use Among Type 2 Diabetes Patients & Fracture Risk
In order to complete their study, researchers took as many as 6,694 patients who were aged over 50 years between years 2008 and 2011. All of them had a tendency to use the same anti-diabetic medications for over a year.
During the study, they analyzed the developing risk of hip fractures and some major major osteoporotic fractures in each group using the popular Cox proportional hazards model in comparison to the metformin group.
This is what Kong observed, “From real-world data using the common data model, we found that insulin users were at elevated risk of major osteoporotic and hip fracture compared to metformin users, which was attenuated in users with a combination of insulin and metformin,” he said.
The incidence of increased risk of fractures among those who used insulin was amplified among those who had well controlled diabetes along with those who were not obese.
The above finding clearly suggest a need for constant fracture monitoring in patients suffering from diabetes.
Source: Medindia
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