The failures in the metabolic regulation that trigger diabetes occur in several organs of the body and treatments to restore glycemic balance are also directed to therapeutic targets located in different tissues.Some drugs act on a single organ and others on several at the same time.
Recently, genetic variants have been identified that influence the response to sulfonylureas and metformin, “first -line” medications for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, that is, those that the doctor recipes a freshly diagnosed patient in the first instance.When the patient is a carrier of these genetic variants of treatment resistance, their diabetes remains uncontrolled until the doctor changes to a different medication.
Dr. Francisco Kuri Breña, director of new developments at Landsteiner Scientific, points out that in Mexico, 30% of people with type 2 diabetes do not respond to metformin, the most prescribed medication in the world for the control of the disease, becauseThey have a genotype that leads to it.
“In our country, only 25% of diabetics follow a treatment and half of them are not well controlled;That is, the medical prescription or the convenient dose is not well determined, so they are not responding as expected, ”says the specialist
It also explains that to determine which treatment is the indicated and the way in which it must be administered, for any disease, a genomic test can be used, which can well be done with a blood sample.
"Now we are understanding the disease more from its origin and not from its symptoms, so that from the genome tests you can select the objective to be treated and which medication is the one that will correct it," says Dr. Kuri Breña.
The development of genetic tests for the variants of response to treatment will allow better control from the beginning, providing the doctor with information to prescribe “second line” medications to those patients who know they will require them in advance.
Landsteiner Scientific: hugging life