Tests show benefits of Merck diabetes drug

Merck & Co's diabetes drug Januvia substantially improves blood sugar levels over two years of treatment when combined with the older metformin and is generally well tolerated, new data on Tuesday showed.


The mean reduction in HbA1c -- a common measure of blood glucose -- in a study involving Januvia 50 mg and metformin 1,000 mg twice-daily was 1.8 percent after the first year and 1.7 percent at two years, researchers told a medical meeting. Merck's Januvia, also known as sitagliptin, which is annualizing sales of $1.6 billion some two years after launch, is currently the only so-called DPP-4 drug on the market. Other additional studies also demonstrated the safety and efficacy profile of the so-called DPP-4 drug, researchers said in presentations at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual conference in Rome.

Poor sleep causes falls among elderly women

Poor sleep makes women 70 or older more likely to fall down, a major cause of injury and death among the elderly, a recent study says.

The risk is there even after taking into account things such as weight, age and the use of sleep medications, said Katie Stone and colleagues at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco. "Sleep deprivation in younger adults leads to slower reaction times, and this may represent an unmeasured factor that could explain these findings," they wrote in a report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study involved nearly 3,000 women 70 and older who were followed for a number of years. Women in the study who slept no more than five hours per night had a 50 percent higher risk of having two or more falls over the course of a year than those who slept more than seven hours, the researchers found.