No More Needles: New Diabetes Treatment in a Pill Approved
Diabetes has been on the rise for decades,
with an estimated 422 million worldwide suffering from the condition as
of 2014 according to the WHO. The majority of these patients suffer from
the acquired form of the disease, known as type 2 diabetes, which is
notorious for being undiagnosed for years. Until recently, the treatment
of type 2 diabetes in its advanced stages, for the majority of
patients, was limited to injections, which are invasive, painful, and
significantly more expensive than oral medications. Luckily, that is
about to change, as a new treatment of the disease has recently passed
FDA approval.
The drug in question is called Rybelsus,
and it belongs to a group of glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) drugs, which
are sometimes prescribed to patients who can no longer control their
blood sugar with diabetes medications that come in pills. These drugs
typically come in injections, as the active ingredients of these
medications are destroyed by stomach acids.
Rybelsus is the first drug of this kind to
come in tablet form, and it has been approved as a standalone or
complementary treatment of type 2 diabetes.
The tablets will be taken daily 30 minutes
before food in the morning. Though the pricing of the new drug will be
comparable to similar injectable treatments, the new medication can help
relieve the psychological and financial burdens for many diabetes
patients, as they will no longer require painful injections and will
ultimately save money on syringes. Given that type 2 diabetes is a
chronic disease and patients require daily or weekly injections for
years on end, this is a major improvement.
The effectiveness and safety of Rybelsus have been proven in several
clinical trials and established that it can stabilize blood sugar levels
in type 2 diabetes patients. The medication is not advised to treat
type 1 diabetes, and the FDA doesn’t recommend Rybelsus as the first
choice of treatment because it may increase the risk of a specific type
of thyroid tumors as a side effect.
Still, the developers of the drug, Novo Nordisk, predict that it will
become the treatment of choice for many patients and will lead the way
in producing other novel treatments that are currently only available in
injection form.