by Sahil Rawal (’19)

Type 2 diabetes is a serious disease that has been connected with organ failures throughout the body. One example of this is kidney disease, which has been shown to develop in 35% of people with Type 2 diabetes. Current treatments for kidney disease involve glucose-controlling systems and RAAS-blocking agents, but these therapies still leave patients at a high risk for death. Empagliflozin, a drug that works by lowering the renal absorption of glucose, has been shown to have positive effects on patients with Type 2 diabetes.

Christoph Wanner and his team of researchers at the Würzburg University Clinic conducted a study focused on whether empagliflozin had a role in attenuating kidney disease that develops as a result of Type 2 diabetes. They tested patients with empagliflozin, as well as a control, and measured the filtration rate to determine creatinine levels and albuminuria, which are indicators of kidney disease. The results of this study showed that 12.7% of the patients who took empagliflozin and 18.8% of patients who took the control had worsening nephropathy. Further results showed that there was a 55% lower risk of nephropathy in the group that took empagliflozin compared to the control group. All in all, this study concluded that empagliflozin slowed the progression of renal failure in patients with Type 2 diabetes.

In the future, this drug could prove vital for patients who have kidney disease and need to slow its progression.

References:

1. Wanner, et al., Empagliflozin and progression of kidney disease in type 2 diabetes. The New England Journal of Medicine (2016). doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa15515920.
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