Newer diabetes medications to consider if you’re too sweet.
Do you remember when the treatment options for your type 2 diabetes were medicines that could make your blood sugar too low – oral medicine or insulin? The available options would also make you gain weight.
Those treatments are still available, and now there are improved versions of each. So, if you and your doctor and your healthcare team haven’t talked about options recently, now might be the time. The experts in the field, using the information from the latest studies, release guidelines. The latest guidelines from the American Diabetes Association have tables that provide comparisons between the options. These tables make a nice display to help you have a conversation with your doctor about which options might work best for you.
Those early medication options mentioned before would either help your pancreas release more insulin or would be an extra source of insulin.
Newer diabetes medication options
Here are ways other, newer medicines help control your diabetes:
- control how your liver stores extra glucose (sugar) and when and how it lets it back out
- control how your kidneys let your glucose out in your urine
- impact how sugar is absorbed from the food you eat
- mimic hormones that control how your body responds to sugar and insulin
- slow down the rate food moves through your body keeping you feeling full longer
- increasing how a cell responds to insulin
The body has many different steps in the way it handles the food you eat and how that food is turned from sugar into energy for your cells. Now, with these newer options, your diabetes can be treated with medicines that address more than one of those steps.
Combinations of medications can help control your diabetes more than one way at a time. Also, when you use combinations of medicines, you can usually use a lower dose. This helps cut down on side effects.
New insulin options
If a combination of medicines you take by mouth don’t help you reach your diabetes control goals, there are new insulins. The old insulins were dosed either around meals or twice a day. There are now basal insulins. These are dosed just once per day. They then provide some support to control your blood sugar all day and all night. Then, when you eat, your blood sugar does not climb as high.
Often, people who have been taking higher and higher doses of oral medicines find they can be on lower doses. The basal insulin helps decrease the need for so much oral medicine.
And, like we said before, using several different medicines helps you use lower doses of each. This is often easier to tolerate than high doses of one or two medicines.
NOTE, this information is all for type 2 diabetes. If you have type 1 you need insulin therapy only because your pancreas has quit working. The insulin is absolutely required. The oral medicines mentioned above won’t control your diabetes.
We have much more we can tell you about diabetes and treatment options. For more information, please contact us at www.medsmash.com/contact or call at 410-472-5078.
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