Diabetes medicines increase risk of fracture

Diabetes, as you will agree, is the most common disease in urban India. Believe it or not there are more than 35 million diabetics in India and the number is expected to increase by another 60% in 2025!
What is worst about diabetes is that it does not affect the blood sugar levels alone; it slowly but surely cripples your heart, kidneys, eyes, foot infections and even blockage of arteries leading to amputations. Thanks to medical science, there are good and easy drugs for diabetes, including injections and oral tablets. However, a new report in the peer-reviewed and prestigious Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) says that some of these drugs may increase your risk to suffer from a fracture.
A paper published in JAMA says, “The insulin-sensitizing thiazolidinediones are a relatively new and effective class of oral antidiabetic agents that have gained wide use in clinical conditions characterized by insulin resistance.”
In this category of drugs, there are two—pioglitazone and rosiglitazone—which account for 21 percent of oral diabetes medications prescribed in the United States and 5 percent of those in Europe. Unfortunately, these are the drugs that increase your chances of suffering from a fracture.
A study conducted by Christian Meier of University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues, have found that “…after adjusting for other risk factors, individuals who were currently taking rosiglitazone and pioglitazone had approximately double or triple the odds of hip and other non-spine fractures than those who did not take these drugs. The odds for fracture were increased among patients who took the drugs for approximately 12 to 18 months and the risk was highest for those with two or more years of therapy.”
However, the authors conclude that people taking other drugs for diabetes were not at this risk.