Diabetes PubMed

Patients' treatment satisfaction on liraglutide was higher than with metformin alone and comparable with glimepiride+metformin.

Liraglutide may be a useful add-on therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes uncontrolled on metformin, when hypoglycemia and/or weight gain are major concerns.

Liraglutide was superior to sitagliptin for reduction of HbA(1c), and was well tolerated with minimum risk of hypoglycaemia. These findings support the use of liraglutide as an effective GLP-1 agent to add to metformin.

Thus, liraglutide is an effective treatment option for use in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

If these encouraging results will be confirmed by long-term studies, liraglutide will acquire a prominent role among the main therapeutic options not only as add-on treatments in case of secondary failure, but also as an early strategy to reduce the burden of diabetes and its complications.

Adding liraglutide to OADs early on may therefore be a good treatment option for patients with type 2 diabetes.

There is, however, currently limited experience with liraglutide in patients beyond mild-stage renal disease.

Once-daily liraglutide was effective and well tolerated when used as monotherapy or in combination with OADs in patients with type 2 DM, and is therefore a promising new treatment option for the management of type 2 DM.

Even though data on the long-term use of liraglutide are still needed, this drug may provide a useful treatment option in patients poorly controlled with dietary modification and exercise and in those whose diabetes is inadequately controlled by oral antidiabetic agents.

Liraglutide has been approved for the combination with metformin and/or a sulfonylurea or with metformin and a thiazolidinedione, if treatment with one or a combination of these drugs is not sufficient for an adequate blood glucose control.