Project summary
Eighty per cent of people living with diabetes take medications to treat their condition. Professor Helen Colhoun will look at the health records of everyone with diabetes in Scotland to learn more about the effectiveness and safety of different diabetes medications when they’re used in the real word. This could pick up any missed safety concerns or benefits that weren’t spotted in clinical trials and transform how diabetes drugs are prescribed. In doing so, this could reduce the number of people living with diabetes who experience harmful side effects, making their care safer and more personalised.
Background to research
Everyone with type 1 diabetes and many people with type 2 diabetes take medications to manage their blood sugar levels and help reduce their risk of complications. And many will take multiple medications.
Before medications can be prescribed, clinical trials must show that they are effective and safe. But trials might exclude certain groups, like older people, or might not be able to tell how different drugs interact with each other. This means looking at the effectiveness and safety of drugs prescribed in the ‘real world’ using electronic health records is a valuable way to pick up any missed issues, or unexpected benefits.
Research aims
Professor Colhoun has built the Diabetes Research Platform that brings together healthcare records of everyone living with diabetes in Scotland. She’ll now use this data to study the effectiveness of newer type 2 diabetes drugs, like GLP-1s and DPP-4 inhibitors, and medications used for treating diabetes-related complications. The team will measure side-effects and look for any safety concerns.
They’ll also explore if some drugs are less safe in certain circumstances or groups of people. Professor Colhoun’s work will create reusable computer code so that her analysis can easily be repeated using other health records databases, like NHS England’s. And so that new drugs which emerge in the future can rapidly be added into the analysis.
Potential benefit to people with diabetes
As numbers of people living with diabetes grow, the need for diabetes medications rises. But people with diabetes are often offered a blanket approach when prescribed medication, which may not consider how the medications interact. Professor Colhoun’s research will rapidly evaluate the safety of diabetes drugs - and may highlight their unexpected benefits. This could vastly improve current prescription guidelines, making care more personalised and safer for people living with diabetes.
