Newest Blockbuster Diabetes Drug Can Increase Your Risk of Cancer

By Dr. Mercola

Diabetes has increased more than 700 percent in the last 50 years. Today, more than one in four Americans are either pre-diabetic or have full-blown diabetes.
The conventional treatment route includes a variety of diabetes drugs, some of which have been found to do far more harm than good. Rosiglitazone, sold under the names of Avandia, Avandamet and Avaglim, is perhaps the most well-known in this category of unmitigated disasters.

Avandia Part of Worst Drug Fraud in History

This past summer, drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline agreed to a record-breaking $3 billion settlement over the sales and marketing practices of several of its drugs, including the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia. The payment is the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history, and the largest fine ever paid by a drug company.
Avandia was found to be profoundly dangerous — a fact hidden by GSK for over 10 years, as they knew it would adversely affect sales¹.
This was revealed in a Senate Finance Committee report, released by Max Baucus and Charles E. Grassley in February 2010. The report also asked why the FDA allowed a clinical trial of Avandia to continue even after the agency estimated the drug had caused an estimated 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007².
Avandia hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug. By 2006 its annual revenue was $3.2 billion. A year later, a damning study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) linked it to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than patients treated with other methods³.
This is a steep price, to say the least, for a disease that does not require drugs to begin with.
There were many articles and reviews published about Avandia following the New England Journal of Medicine study, but research from the Mayo Clinic revealed that 90 percent of scientists who wrote favorable articles about the drug had financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline⁴. Unfortunately, a committee of independent experts still recommended that Avandia remain on the market, despite its many risks, and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.
On September 23, 2010, the FDA restricted access to Avandia⁵, but it didn't take it off the market. Under the ruling, the drug is still available to patients not already taking it, but only if they are unable to achieve glycemic control using other medications and, in consultation with their health care professional, decide not to take a different drug for medical reasons.
Shockingly, current users of Avandia were told to continue using the medication if they appeared to be benefiting from it and they acknowledged that they understood the risks. Doctors had to attest to and document their patients' eligibility and patients had to review statements describing the cardiovascular safety concerns.
Unlike the US FDA, British regulators ruled that the benefits of Avandia no longer outweighed the risks, and so, in late September 2010, they told 90,000 British diabetes patients to stop taking it.

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