New Avandia Study Doesn't Prove Safety

June 5, 2007 – Preliminary data from a heart-safety study of Avandia -- released on the eve of a Congressional hearing into the matter -- do not settle questions raised about the diabetes drug's possible heart attack risks.

Avandia maker GlaxoSmithKline says the study findings are "reassuring." But three new editorials from TheNew England Journal of Medicine suggest that doctors and patients will not be reassured.

The GSK-funded RECORD study, managed by an independent steering committee, enrolled some 4,500 type 2 diabetes patients from Europe, Asia, and Australia. All the patients take the standard diabetes drugs metformin or sulfonylurea. Half added Avandia to their treatment, and half received a combination of metformin and sulfonylurea.

The study is supposed to continue until most patients have been treated for six years. However, a recent NEJM study that combined all available data suggested that Avandia might raise a person's risk of heart attack by 42%. In response to the resulting furor, the study authors -- and the NEJM'seditors -- decided to release data collected after patients had completed only 3.75 years of the study.

The study's findings, as reported by Newcastle University researcher Philip D. Home, DPhil, and colleagues:

• There is no evidence that Avandia increases death from all causes of heart disease or death from all causes. Avandia patients did slightly worse than other patients, but the difference is not statistically significant, meaning it could be due to chance.
• Avandia more than doubles a person's risk of heart failure, although that risk is still low. This result was expected, as the class of drugs to which Avandia belongs has this effect.
• The study data are "insufficient" to determine whether the drug increases a person's risk of heart attack. The data "are consistent with as much as a 19% improvement, and as much as an 86% worsening, in risk," Home and colleagues report.

In a telephone news conference held to discuss the findings, GSK chief medical officer Ronald Krall, MD, said the study findings exonerate Avandia.

"These results are reassuring to doctors and to patients, both those with diabetes and those taking Avandia," Krall said. "These results add to the weight of evidence ... showing that Avandia is comparable in safety to the standard diabetes drugs."

But editorials published alongside the study paint a far different picture.

The study has several flaws, notes David M. Nathan, MD, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"The interim results of the RECORD trial do not provide any assurance of the safety of treatment with [Avandia]," Nathan writes. "Physicians may find it difficult to explain to patients why they are starting treatment with a potentially dangerous drug when other choices with longer and better safety records are available."