The American journal of medicine
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The development of insulin analogs has made improved treatment of type 2 diabetes possible. In this article, structural alterations, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, clinical end points, and safety issues are reviewed for the currently available basal insulins, rapid-acting insulins, and premixes. The flatter activity profiles of insulin glargine and insulin detemir translate into good clinical efficacy with a lower risk of hypoglycemia relative to neutral protamine Hagedorn insulin. ⋯ Convenience is greater for patients because the analogs can be injected just before a meal. In premix or biphasic insulins, a proportion of the rapid-acting analog is protaminated, providing both rapid-acting and intermediate-acting components in one formulation, thus reducing the number of injections required. Alterations to human insulin have resulted in improvements in safety, efficacy, tolerability, and convenience for patients.
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The choice to recommend antithrombotic therapy to patients with atrial fibrillation should rely on cardioembolic and bleeding risk stratification. Sharing some risk factors, schemes to predict thrombotic and bleeding risk are expected not to be independent, yet the degree of their association has never been clearly quantified. ⋯ In a real-world population with atrial fibrillation, we confirmed that the cardioembolic and bleeding risk classifications are correlated but not exchangeable. It is then worth verifying the advantages of a strategy adopting a combined risk assessment over a strategy relying only on the cardioembolic risk evaluation.