http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120625152352.htm

Elderly Diabetics Have Fewer Bouts of Hypoglycemia at Night With New Insulin
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2012) — A new variety of long-lasting insulin, called insulin degludec, lowers the risk of nighttime low blood sugar in elderly diabetic adults compared with insulin glargine, a systematic review of diabetes studies has found.

Show doctor.

Thanks for the link Write. Obviously this is not on the market yet but it looks like it might offer an incremental improvement over the Lantus that we currently use. Interestingly I haven’t had a lot of patients with symptomatic hypoglycemic episodes since Lantus came out a few years ago but we obviously dont wake patients up at 4am to check their sugar so there may be asymptomatic hypoglycemia that I am not aware of and this drug sounds like it might help prevent some of these. Good news for diabetics.

Glargine was a revolution for feline diabetics. We did fair but not great with beef/pork insulin, but the aa sequence of human insulin is not as close to dog and cat insulin, so when the recombinant human insulins cam on the market and the beef/pork mostly went away, things got worse for cats especially. Now with glargine, we get maybe 75% emissions where we can wean the cats off insulin for months to years and we get much better control in the ones that remain insulin dependent. I do occasionally see a cat newly started on glargine that is very hypoglycemic, but they hardly ever are clinical for it.

So I sort of hope they don’t find a “better” inslin than glargine for humans just because if they do and the pharmas can’t make enough money selling glargine for kitties, my diabetic patients may be SOL.