Avandia Increases Heart Failure Risk in Elderly, Canadian Study Finds

Senior citizens who take the blockbuster diabetes drug Avandia are more likely to suffer heart attack and die than patients who use another diabetes pill, Canadian researchers report.

Avandia was once a top earning drug for GlaxoSmithKline PLC, but it has been dogged for years by study after study which found it raises the risks of heart failure and death. Glaxo has disputed the findings and even presented its own research showing Avandia is no more dangerous than similar medications, but sales of the drug have fallen sharply.

Researchers from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto poured over six years worth of medical records from about 40,000 patients age 66 and older. They found that for every 93 patients treated with Avandia rather than the rival drug Actos, there would be on average one more cardiovascular event or death each year.

A 2008 Harvard Medical School study of elderly Avandia patients reached nearly the same conclusion.

Is Avandia Safe?

The findings are enough to question whether the continued use of such diabetes drugs on most patients is safe, the authors said.

Avandia is known by the chemical name rosiglitazone, while Actos is known generically as pioglitazone. As many as one million Americans still take the drug as part of diabetes treatment.

In heart failure patients, the heart cannot pump enough blood around the body, which can lead to deadly heart attack, stroke, and other serious problems.

Glaxo is again defending Avandia against another wave of negative study findings and saying the Canadian research does not reflect evidence from two controlled trials that compared Avandia and Actos and found no differences between the two drugs in terms of in heart failure.

The drugmaker is now enrolling patients in a long-term clinical trial that will look at cardiovascular outcomes and compare the effect of the two drugs, officials said.

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