A common diabetes drug has been found to lower the risk of kidney failure in a new study.
The drug that’s used to help control blood sugar in people with diabetes has health benefits.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been forced to use dialysis to stay alive.
The finding has raised some eyebrows since diabetes is a major cause of kidney failure worldwide.
The risk of kidney failure and cardiovascular-related problems were lowered in patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease who took a daily dose of the drug canagliflozin as part of the study published in a health journal on Sunday.
Type 2 diabetes hitting a younger generation 02:33The study included 4,401 patients, aged 30 and older, with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
The researchers found that in the canagliflozin group the relative risk of death from renal causes was 34% lower, and the relative risk of end-stage kidney disease was 32% lower.
The group also had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke and hospitalization for heart failure.
Based on data in the study, the researchers estimated that canagliflozin treatment would prevent 22 hospitalizations for heart failure and 25 composite events of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke among 1,000 patients.
Diabetes cases have quadrupled in just over 3 decades.
As for harmful outcomes, canagliflozin has been found to increase the risk of having a lower limb amputation a side effect, but the researchers saw no significant difference in the risk of lower-limb amputation between the two groups in the study.
Rates of bone fracture, another known side effect of canagliflozin, were also similar in the two groups, according to the study.
The study also showed that risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening problem when the body starts breaking down fat at an unhealthily fast rate, was low overall but higher in the canagliflozin group.
The study had some limitations, including that it did not include patients who had very advanced kidney disease.
Nor did it include patients whose kidney diseases were believed to be due to conditions other than type 2 diabetes.
More research is needed to determine whether the study’s findings could be generalized to other types of kidney disease.