New diabetes drug linked to infections and cancer

Wednesday, July 06, 2011 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: diabetes drugs, cancer, health news

(NaturalNews) Tests on a new diabetes drug being developed by drug giants Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have revealed that the new class of drug may be linked to causing urinary tract and genital infections, and several forms of cancer. Add to that dapagliflozin's many other known side effects, and the experimental drug fares even worse than metformin, the more-common drug for treating type 2 diabetes.

The two-year study found that out of 5,478 patients treated with dapagliflozin, nine of them developed bladder cancer. Only one patient in the control group of 3,156, on the other hand, developed bladder cancer. Based on these results, a person taking dapagliflozin appears five times more likely to develop bladder cancer than a person not taking the drug.

The results were similar for cases of breast cancer. Nine out of 2,223 women taking dapagliflozin developed breast cancer, while only one of 1,053 in the control group developed breast cancer. These figures point to women taking dapagliflozin being more than four times more likely than women not taking the drug to develop breast cancer.

The way dapagliflozin works is that it blocks glucose from being absorbed into the bloodstream through the kidneys, and instead dispels it directly through the urine. By artificially flooding the urinary tract with excess sugars in this way, the urinary tract and genitals become far more prone to bacterial infections than if the sugar was processed in the normal way, and the negative effects of this were observed in the trials as well.

According to data presented at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), other serious side effects associated with taking dapagliflozin include back pain, influenza, diarrhea, headache, nasopharyngitis, upper respiratory tract infection, renal impairment or failure, and hypoglycemia.

Ultimately, there is no need for diabetics to take dangerous drugs like dapagliflozin and risk complicating their condition with new ones. Reversing and curing diabetes is fully possible, and it can be done safely and naturally without the use of drugs (https://www.naturalnews.com/030150_diabetes_A...).

Sources for this story include:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110627/hl_nm/us...