DM TYPE 1

Read a selection of your colleagues’ responses and respond to at least two of your colleagues on two different days who selected a different type of diabetes than you did. Provide recommendations for alternative drug treatments and patient education strategies for treatment and management.

ANSWER

It is true as indicated that metformin has long been used for the treatment of T2DM. The causes of this type of diabetes are the production of ineffective insulin that is either deficient, inadequate or lacking altogether.  However, the side effects of the drug such as diarrhoea, nausea and the fact that it is completely unusable for patients with kidney patients, prompted medical practitioners to look for alternative drugs. According to the American Diabetes Association and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologist, incretin-based therapy can be used in the event metformin cannot be used (Waldrop 2018). In the human body, incretins are a group of hormones involved with metabolism that aid in the decrease of blood glucose which comes from food. Incretin based therapies can also be applied together with metformin in a situation when metformin is insufficient.

Incretin based therapy consists of a method to improve fasting and postprandial blood glucose, lower the risk of hypoglycaemia, and reductions of glycated haemoglobin. A good example of such therapies is Alogliptin, Linagliptin and Saxagliptin (Waldrop 2018). When either is used together with metformin, the prescription information must contain a safe and effective mode of application.

Medical practitioners are additionally using these drugs and the future promises more prescription on T1DM patients. Additionally, the same drugs can be applied to other diseases as a result of research showing a relationship between T1DM and neurodegenerative diseases (Meier 2019). An alternative to metformin, incretin-based drugs has proved its efficiency in treatment and also the management of body weight through processes involved with hypoglycaemia. However, early warnings of the drugs causing pancreatitis have been documented, although research on it is still unclear (Meier 2019).

References

Meier, J. J. (2019). The role of incretin-based therapies in the management of type 1 diabetes mellitus: perspectives on the past, present and future. Diabetes mellitus, 22(5), 461-466.

Waldrop, G., Zhong, J., Peters, M., Goud, A., Chen, Y. H., Davis, S. N., … & Rajagopalan, S. (2018). Incretin-based therapy in type 1 diabetes: an evidence-based systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Diabetes and its Complications, 32(1), 113-122.