A diabetes drug has been deemed safe for use by HIV patients. This is according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who have studied the use of sitagliptin in HIV-infected individuals, and found that it did not adversely affect their wellbeing.
When you have HIV, it puts your wellness at a higher risk of heart attacks, diabetes and insulin problems. To compound the problem, there is a concern that many drugs will weaken the immune system of HIV patients, and so there are not many drug options to prevent those secondary problems. However, the study, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, showed that sitagliptin did not damage the immune system.
According to senior investigator Kevin E. Yarasheski, PhD, ‘The drug we studied, sitagliptin, was developed for type 2 diabetes and has been on the market since 2006, but it hadn’t been tested for safety in HIV. In our small study, the drug seems to be safe. Now, it needs to be tested in people who are HIV positive and have metabolic problems to see whether it can reduce their likelihood of developing diabetes.’
If HIV affects your sexual health, more often than not you are given a drug “cocktail” to keep the level of the virus low, and to prevent your HIV diagnosis from becoming a death sentence. However, the drug therapy you need to tackle HIV is what increases your risk of other conditions, meaning that there is a real need for safer and more effective treatments.
For the study, 20 HIV positive male and female participants, who were already on the drug cocktail, were also given either sitagliptin, or a placebo. The researchers continued to measure their immune function over the six-month period, counting levels of a key immune cell called CD4+ T-cell. Yarasheski explained, ‘Everyone came into the study with a viral load below the level that could be detected, and they all had healthy CD4 counts. Their viral loads remained undetectable throughout the study, and their CD4 counts did not decline.’
He continued, ‘The drug gives insulin a boost. It lengthens the time insulin stays active in the body, so more sugar can be processed out of the bloodstream.’ However, as previous animal studies have shown that sitagliptin affects the immune system, ‘the fear was that if we gave HIV patients this drug, it could alter their already compromised immune system,’ he said. ‘But the results of our study suggest that doesn’t happen.’
Comments are closed.