Liraglutide A Drug to Manage Pediatric Type 2 Diabetes

Release Date: 24-Sep-2019

A new study about the activity of the Liraglutide indicates that it is beneficial for glycemic control in children and adolescents with type 2 Diabetes Mellitus for up to a year. The trial involves the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1) receptor agonist in combination with a commonly used drug for type 2 diabetes metformin, also found specifying effects on the gastrointestinal events of the young T2D patient’s, which are associated with the drug.

The research was led by William V. Tamborlane, MD, of the department of the pediatrics at Yale University. The study was about a time period of 52 weeks and the number of patients involved in the study was about 135, with an age group of about 10 to 17 years. The patients with high body mass and gyrated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels were selected.

The main aim of research was to observe the potential of liraglutide related to the benefits along with the metformin in the patient population which often reported early glycemic control loss during monotherapy.

In US, insulin is the only current drug class approved for young T2D patients who do not have suitable response to metformin. In the case of adult T2D patients, they have a series of both oral and injectable agents including GLP-1 agonists and sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors available for controlling the level of glucose.

According to tamborlane and colleagues, this discrepancy in available treatments for youth as compared with adults persists because of a lack of successfully completed trials needed for approval of new drugs for the treatment of type 2 diabetes in children since a trial of metformin was completed in 1999.

The phase III study of Liraglutide in Pediatrics with Diabetes is the result of a four-year patient enrollment and one-year treatment period which began in 2012 and was finalized in 2018.Metformin was admixture in all the patients involved in the trail. The result was assessed for a primary endpoint of change in HbA1c from the baseline within a period of 26 weeks. The secondary endpoint of study was observed by determining the change in the glucose level after fasting.

This study was published online in The New England Journal of Medicine. Furthermore, after the course of 52 weeks, a decrease of 0.50 percentage points in mean gyrated hemoglobin levels was observed with liraglutide whereas an increase of 0.80 percentage points was observed with placebo. This increase an increase similar to previously reported changes in glycated hemoglobin levels observed over 12 months in youth with type 2 diabetes treated with metformin with or without insulin.