However, patients are advised not to stop taking their medicine if they begin to experience pain.
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We urge health care professionals and patients to report side effects involving DPP-4 inhibitors to the FDA MedWatch program, using the information in the “Contact FDA” box at the bottom of the page. The other cases were reactions to Onglyza (saxagliptin), make by AstraZeneca; Tradjenta (linagliptin), made by Boehringer Ingelheim; and Nesina (alogliptin), made by Takeda Pharmaceutical. It added that they have issued a new Warning and Precaution regarding this risk to all medicines’ labels in the drug class, also called dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors.
Merck’s Januvia has dominated the DPP-IV market and is the company’s highest-selling drug, generating about $1.9 billion in sales for the first six months of 2015.
People taking DPP-4 inhibitors for diabetes may have good reason to worry about the side effects of their medications.
You may want to reconsider your treatment strategy, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has just announced that an entire class of diabetes drugs can lead to severe and debilitating joint pain. The drugs are commonly prescribed to patients who have type 2 diabetes, which helps to lower the blood sugar level in the body. Doctors were warned by the agency against prescribing drugs to patients with joint pains in those instances when the drugs are deemed as the cause. The timeline of the approval of this class of drugs had been from October 16, 2006 through December. 31, 2013.
The medications are known as DPP-4 inhibitors, are have a list of other known side effects. One of the drugs, Onglyza, was associated with an increased risk of hospitalization for heart failure in a clinical study.
However, most of the type 2 diabetes medicine comes with severe warnings about potential symptoms, and the FDA has cautioned that their recent findings should not prompt patients to abruptly stop taking them. In eight of the remaining 13 cases, a period of 44 days to a year elapsed between the onset of symptoms and discontinuation of the drug. Januvia, for example, can cause serious inflammation in the pancreas, resulting in pancreatitis.
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The same patients were reported as saying their pain cleared up after ceasing the drugs.
