Type 2 diabetes drug Rosiglitazone increases risk of heart problems

A new study has given further evidence that rosiglitazone can contribute to risk of heart problems and heart failure.

The British Medical Journal study was led by the Yale School of Public Health. It analysed the results of more than 130 trials involving over 48,000 adult patients that compared rosiglitazone with any control for at least 24 weeks. Individual Patient Data (IPD) was available for 33 trials, included 21156 patients. The remaining trials only had summary level data available.

GlaxoSmithKline, the drugs manufacturer, has recently made efforts to make IPD available which allowed the team the ability to analyse raw clinical data to assess uncertainties of the cardiovascular risk of the drug.

Through this, they found rosiglitazone was associated with a 33% increased risk of a cardiovascular event likeheart attack, heart failure, cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular related death. This was estimated from the 274 events among 11,837 rosiglitazone patients and 219 events among 9,319 control patients.

Joshua Wallach, the study’s lead author, commented on the results and said: “Since 2007, studies have reported conflicting findings about whether rosiglitazone increases the risk of heart attacks. However, these studies did not have access to the raw data, also known as individual patient level data (IPD), from clinical trials, which are more reliable when estimating a drug's true safety profile.”

Rosiglitazone is no longer available in Europe and is rarely prescribed in the US.

Conor Kavanagh