Doctors believe that in India, where obesity and diabetes are prevalent, diabetes treatment strategies that target numerous ailments can play a beneficial role
Insulin pens, glucose monitors, automated insulin delivery stickers, the latest medicines, fitness trackers, and more — your worries about managing diabetes wisely may soon have more answers.
Not only medical devices but wearable fitness trackers ensure an active lifestyle and maintain muscle mass for effective diabetes management.
This certainly is good news for patients in India — the diabetic capital of the world. The estimates by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research (NCDIR) show that by 2025, India could have around seven crore diabetics and by 2030, the number could rise to eight crore.
While the disease’s management requires balancing factors such as food intake, physical activity, and stress levels, in recent years, innovations in diagnostic systems and the latest medications are enabling easier and more effective management.
According to Dr Rajesh Rajput, former head, department of endocrinology, Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), Rohtak: “Modern diabetic medications can now tackle diabetes-related illnesses much more effectively and replace injectables, which was not the case some years ago.”
Following the discovery of glucagon-like peptide 1 receptors, there has been an ongoing endeavour to create novel therapeutic alternatives that can give more efficacious glycaemic control with a lower risk of complications, hence improved safety.
Doctors believe that in India, where obesity and diabetes are prevalent, diabetes treatment strategies that target numerous ailments can play a beneficial role. Otherwise, worsening of diabetes leads to chronic complications such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, foot amputations or blindness among others.
LATEST CLASS OF MEDICINES TO THE RESCUE
In the last two years, several latest anti-diabetic medicines such as Vildagliptin and Sitagliptin have lost their patents. In fact, in 2023, Dapagliflozin is set to lose its patent whereas in 2024, Canagliflozin will be off patent. Linagliptin and Empagliflozin will also lose patents in 2025.
Most of these drugs belong to the gliptins family, which is known to improve glycaemic control in type 2 diabetes, especially where popularly used medications such as Metformin don’t perform adequately. With these new products entering with lower price options, a wave of new medicines may also come into the treatment regime.
Experts explain that the latest medicines can offer targeted solutions to people with type-2 diabetes.
For instance, some newer anti-diabetic agents also help to achieve more holistic goals of controlling risk factors, as well as providing cardio (heart)-renal (kidney)-metabolic protection, beyond just lowering blood sugar levels.
German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim’s innovative anti-diabetic medicine Empagliflozin is the first oral glucose-lowering agent, which was proven, approved, and recommended for risk-reduction of cardiovascular death in patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus and established cardiovascular disease.
Empagliflozin is also approved for the management of heart failure, regardless of underlying diabetes status.
“In fact, it has also been the first landmark intervention to significantly improve outcomes in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction and is approved as well as recommended for this indication,” Dr Shraddha Bhure, medical director of Boehringer Ingelheim India, told News18.com.
According to Dr Nalini, founder and chief executive officer of Arogya World, a global health non-profit organisation working in India to prevent non-communicable diseases, newer classes of drugs gives hope that modern medicine can help people with diabetes better control and manage their disease.
“These medicines coax the pancreas in different ways or interact with biochemical pathways to improve the uptake of glucose and new tech devices help patients monitor blood sugar continuously.”
AI, BIG DATA, PRECISION MEDICINE – FUTURE OF YOUR SUGAR CONTROL
According to doctors, it is essential to recognise the development of complications in diabetes in a timely manner to ensure optimum intervention.
Apart from modern devices, screening for heart diseases and kidney diseases can help improve the quality of life of patients.
For meaningful adoption of a new diagnostic intervention, robust clinical validation, the accuracy of measurement, access, and ease of use are some essential prerequisites.
Newer technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), tele-health, augmented reality, and big data analytics are facilitating better healthcare research and delivery at multiple levels, experts claim.
These advancements, Bhure from Boehringer Ingelheim said, are now helping researchers and medical professionals to better understand the disease, discover new interventions, evaluate therapies more efficiently (such as virtual clinical trials), analyse evidence, predict risks, design treatment regimens, recognise patient-centric priorities, measure effectiveness of interventions, and monitor outcomes.
Also, advancements in wearable technology and the internet of things (IoT) that integrates sensors to gather real-time data along with AI have made precision health monitoring and diagnosis possible.
“It is enabling a personalised approach to diabetes management by helping improve disrupted metabolism for individuals with type 2 diabetes,” Bhure said.
Rajput, who now heads the department of endocrinology at Rohtak-based Kainos Super Specialty Hospital, believes that with crores of diabetics in India, there is enormous potential for the development of revolutionary treatment options.
“In the coming years, type 2 diabetes care is expected to focus on therapeutic techniques that target several diseases with a single medicine.”
However, experts also caution that with any scientific innovation, the strengths and limitations of a new healthcare technology solution must be rigorously appraised, and adequately recognised, before adoption.
Also, doctors emphasised that in spite of all these advances, “healthy living” has a big role to play in the future trajectory of the disease.
