European Union drug regulators approved a drug for the treatment of diabetes last week that may never make it to American pharmacies. Galvus is a much anticipated medication that may offer new benefits to millions of people with diabetes.

There is a new and reputable diabetes medication guide you can access online for free.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) produced the guide and released it this month with an intended audience of type 2 diabetes patients. If you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can click on the following link to download your copy: Pills for Type 2 Diabetes.

All drugs have side effects. With some medications we don't often find out until after a few million people have used a product, while with others we eventually discover serious side-effects.

For Avandia it is more bad news this week as researchers from Salk Institute for Biological Studies report new evidence that some people taking Avandia lose bone mass at a rate faster than average.

Thirty cases of pancreatitis among users of a leading diabetes treatment prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue a safety alert.

People taking Byetta should seek prompt medical care if they experience unexplained abdominal pain, which may or may not be accompanied by vomiting. In the meantime, Byetta's maker, Amylin, is working with the FDA, and will revise the drug's labeling to warn about the possibility of developing acute pancreatitis while taking the medication. 

CHICAGO – It is hard to know which medications to use to lower blood glucose levels. Beside their potency as anti-diabetes medications, diabetics  must also consider side effects.  Many of them are potentially serious.

A study combining previous research suggests that use of pioglitazone, marketed as brand name Actos, significantly reduces the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death, but increases the risk for serious heart failure, according to an article in the September 12 issue of JAMA. The risk of heart failure is low, while the reduction in heart attack rate is high. As a result, we suspect that many doctors will be migrating their patients to Actos (brand name for pioglitazone).

Your genes may be signaling how well you respond to metformin.  If you have the right genetic makeup, metformin may lower your A1C score to a healthy level.  A change or variation in gene that tells the body how to create a small structure with cells call an organic cation transporter 1 (OCT1) contributes to metformin's effectiveness.  (A simplified explanation of an organic cation transporter is a chemical that helps certain atoms to enter a cell.)