Researchers uncover common heart drug's link to diabetes

Research provides insight into why statin drugs carry increased risk

2014-06-11

(Press-News.org) Hamilton, ON (June 11, 2014) - McMaster University researchers may have found a novel way to suppress the devastating side effect of statins, one of the worlds' most widely used drugs to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease.

The research team—led by Jonathan Schertzer, assistant professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and Canadian Diabetes Association Scholar—discovered one of the pathways that link statins to diabetes. Their findings could lead to the next generation of statins by informing potential combination therapies while taking the drug.

Approximately 13 million people, or half of those over the age of 40, could be prescribed a statin drug in their lifetime.

"Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in the world, and have been fantastic at reducing cardiovascular events," Schertzer says. "But the side effects of statins can be far worse than not being able to eat grapefruit. Recently, an increased risk of diabetes has been added to the warning label for statin use. This was perplexing to us because if you are improving your metabolic profile with statins you should actually be decreasing the incidence of diabetes with these drugs, yet, the opposite happened."

Schertzer's group investigated further. "We found that statins activated a very specific immune response, which stopped insulin from doing its job properly. So we connected the dots and found that combining statins with another drug on top of it, Glyburide, suppressed this side effect."

He says the finding has the potential to develop new targets for this immune pathway that do not interfere with the benefits of statins.

"It's premature to say we are going to change this drug, but now that we understand one way it can cause this side effect we can develop new strategies to minimize side effects. This may even include using natural products or nutritional strategies to subvert the side effects of statins," he says.

The next stage of their research is to understand how statins promote diabetes by understanding how they work in the pancreas, which secretes insulin. They also hope to better understand if this immune pathway is involved in other side effects of statins, such as muscle pain and life-threatening muscle breakdown.

Schertzer emphasizes that statins are important and widely prescribed drugs and understanding how they promote adverse effects may lead to necessary improvements in this drug class, which has the potential to affect a large segment of the population.

"With the new federal warning label on the risk of diabetes with statin usage, people are heavily debating its pros and cons. We think this is the wrong conversation to have. Statins are a great drug for many people. What we really should be talking about is how to make them better and we are beginning to understand the basic biology of statins so we can do just that. The next step for our work is to understand if all of the major side effects of statins occur by acting on this specific immune-metabolism pathway."

INFORMATION: The research is published in the medical journal Diabetes and was supported by funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Diabetes Association.

A photo is available at http://fhs.mcmaster.ca/media/statin_drugs_and_diabetes/

The paper is available at http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/search?fulltext=Schertzer&submit=yes&x=0&y=0

For further information:

Jonathan Schertzer, assistant professor
Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences
905-525-9140, ext. 22255
schertze@mcmaster.ca

Veronica McGuire
Media Relations Coordinator
Faculty of Health Sciences
McMaster University
905-525-9140, ext. 22169
vmcguir@mcmaster.ca

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Study identifies risk factors for hospital readmissions

2014-06-11

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – June 11, 2014 – Hospital readmission, an important measure of quality care, costs the United States an estimated $17 billion each year. And according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), about half of those readmissions could be avoided. Therefore, there is significant interest in identifying factors that influence readmission rates, especially those that can be identified prior to discharge. To pinpoint which stroke patients are most at risk, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center undertook a retrospective case-control ...

Peer pressure is weaker for kids to quit smoking

2014-06-11

Adolescents tend to be more powerful in influencing their friends to start smoking than in helping them to quit, according to sociologists. In a study of adolescent friendship networks and smoking use over time, the researchers found that friends exert influence on their peers to both start and quit smoking, but the influence to start is stronger. "What we found is that social influence matters, it leads nonsmoking friends into smoking and nonsmoking friends can turn smoking friends into nonsmokers," said Steven Haas, associate professor of sociology and demography, ...

Sun emits 3 X-class flares in 2 days

2014-06-11

On June 11, 2014, the sun erupted with its third X-class flare in two days. The flare was classified as an X1.0 and it peaked at 5:06 a.m. EDT. Images of the flare were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. All three flares originated from an active region on the sun that recently rotated into view over the left limb of the sun. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. To see a video ...

Harvard study finds substance abuse & mental health problems in MSM interfere with HIV medication adherence

2014-06-11

New Rochelle, NY, June 11, 2014—Men who have sex with men (MSM) account for more than 60% of HIV infections in the U.S. and 78% of new infections in men. Antiretroviral therapy can control HIV infection and suppress viral load, but mental health and substance abuse problems common among MSM can interfere with medication adherence. How conditions such as depression and alcohol and drug abuse can affect anti-HIV therapy and the success of various interventions are explored in an article published in LGBT Health, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. ...

What's the best way for toddlers to acquire verb meaning?

2014-06-11

EVANSTON, Ill. - New research is shedding light on what kind of sentences are best at facilitating the growth of toddlers' vocabularies. A new study conducted at Northwestern University provides evidence that toddlers can learn verbs after hearing them only twice. Sandra R. Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and Sudha Arunachalam, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern, note that previous studies have shown that children as young as two years of age can successfully learn novel verbs after they've heard the verb many times ...

Company man or family man? Fatherhood and identity in the office

2014-06-11

There is no "one size fits all" image of how men view their role as fathers within the context of the workplace. However, fatherhood is becoming a more serious and time consuming role for men to fulfill. Therefore employers must acknowledge that many fathers want to be more than just traditional "organization men" who dedicate their life to their work. These insights come from Beth Humberd of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in the US, one of the authors of a study about how professional men experience fatherhood in the context of their workplace. The article appears ...

Health of Hispanic moms and babies a growing concern, new report says

2014-06-11

New York, New York — Hispanic women are significantly more likely to have a baby with a neural tube birth defect, and nearly a quarter of all preterm births in the United States are Hispanic, according to a new report from the March of Dimes. The report is available in English and Spanish and can be view at: http://www.marchofdimes.com/Peristats/pdflib/991/MOD_2014HispanicReport.pdf http://www.marchofdimes.com/Peristats/pdflib/991/MOD_2014HispanicReport_Spanish.pdf Thalia, a global ambassador for the March of Dimes, and Latin Grammy Award-winning artist and mother ...

China today: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation?

2014-06-11

China, from 2015 the world's biggest economy, is its worst polluter already now. It has not yet, but will be most probably climbing the top position also with regards the aggregate contribution to climate change (historical emission residues included), called the climate debt. At the same time, it is the largest victim of environmental change, and the leading country in cleaning-up the environmental mess - the government has taken bold steps towards improvement. Could the largest polluter become the world's last best hope for establishing a global ecological civilisation? ...

Cristina now a hurricane, NASA's TRMM satellite sees heavy rainfall within

2014-06-11

Before Tropical Storm Cristina intensified into a hurricane, NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead and gathered data that showed areas of heavy rainfall were occurring within. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) upgraded the third tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific Ocean to tropical storm status and named it Cristina on June 10 at 0300 UTC (8 p.m. PDT). Earlier that morning at 1238 UTC (5:38 a.m. PDT), the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite flew over the depression and gathered rainfall data that hinted that the storm was intensifying. At NASA's ...

The solar wind breaks through the Earth's magnetic field

2014-06-11

Space is not empty. A wind of charged particles blows outwards from the Sun, carrying a magnetic field with it. Sometimes this solar wind can break through the Earth's magnetic field. Researchers at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala now have an answer to one of the questions about how this actually occurs. When two areas with plasma (electrically charged gas) and magnetic fields with different orientations collide, the magnetic fields can be "clipped off" and "reconnected" so that the topology of the magnetic field is changed. This magnetic reconnection ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Study shows psychedelic drug psilocybin gives comparable long-term antidepressant effects to standard antidepressants, but may offer additional benefits

Study finds symptoms of depression during pregnancy linked to specific brain activity: scientists hope to develop test for “baby blues” risk

UK study shows there is less stigma against LGBTQ people than you might think, but people with mental health problems continue to experience higher levels of stigma