EXPERT ANALYSIS FROM DPSG-NA 2017
WASHINGTON (FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS) – The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ conclusion that insulin should be considered the first-line pharmacologic treatment for gestational diabetes came under fire at a recent meeting on diabetes in pregnancy, indicating the extent to which controversy persists over the use of oral antidiabetic medications in pregnancy.
“Like many others, I’m perplexed by the strong endorsement,” Mark Landon, MD, professor and chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Ohio State University, Columbus, said during an open discussion of oral hypoglycemic agents held at the biennial meeting of the Diabetes in Pregnancy Study Group of North America.
Dr. Landon and several other researchers and experts in diabetes in pregnancy expressed discontent with any firm prioritization of the drugs most commonly used for gestational diabetes, saying that there are not yet enough data to do so.
“Clearly we have options that our patients should be informed of, and [we should] allow our patients to participate in the decision making,” said E. Albert Reece , MD, PhD, MBA, dean of the school of medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, calling the strength of recommendations “ill advised on a scientific basis.”Others provided anecdotal observations from their practices of what seem to be ethnic differences in response to medications; such comments were reflective of recurring discussions throughout the meeting on the heterogeneity of gestational diabetes and the possible need to better individualize treatment strategies.
The endorsement of insulin as the first-line option when pharmacologic treatment is needed is a level A conclusion/recommendation in ACOG’s updated practice bulletin on gestational diabetes mellitus, released in July 2017 ( Obstet Gynecol. 2017;130[1]:e17-37 ). In accompanying level B recommendations, ACOG stated that in women who decline insulin therapy or who are believed to be “unable to safely administer insulin,” metformin is a “reasonable second-line choice.” Glyburide “should not be recommended as a first-line pharmacologic treatment because, in most studies, it does not yield equivalent outcomes to insulin.”
Level A recommendations are defined as “based on good and consistent scientific evidence,” while the evidence for level B recommendations is “limited or inconsistent.”
Asked to comment on the concerns voiced at the meeting, an ACOG spokeswoman said that the recommendations were developed after a thorough literature review, but that the evidence was being reexamined with the option of updating the practice bulletin.
Current recommendations
In its practice bulletin, ACOG noted that oral antidiabetic medications, such as glyburide and metformin, are increasingly used among women with GDM, despite not being approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this indication and even though insulin continues to be the recommended as first-line therapy by the American Diabetes Association (ADA).
The ADA, in a summary of its 2017 guideline on the management of diabetes in pregnancy, stated that insulin is the “preferred medication for treating hyperglycemia in gestational diabetes mellitus, as it does not cross the placenta to a measurable extent.” Metformin and glyburide are options, “but both cross the placenta to the fetus, with metformin likely crossing to a greater extent than glyburide” ( Diabetes Care. 2017 Jan;40[Suppl 1]:S114- 9 ).Regarding metformin, the ACOG bulletin cited two trials that randomized women to metformin or insulin – one in which both groups experienced similar rates of a composite outcome of perinatal morbidity, and another in which women receiving metformin had lower mean glucose levels, less gestational weight gain, and neonates with lower rates of hypoglycemia.
ACOG also cited a meta-analysis, that found “minimal differences” between neonates of women randomized to metformin versus insulin, but also noted that “interestingly, women randomized to metformin experienced a higher rate of preterm birth” and a lower rate of gestational hypertension ( BMJ. 2015;350:h102 ).
With respect to glyburide, the ACOG bulletin said that two recent meta-analyses had demonstrated worse neonatal outcomes with glyburide, compared with insulin, and that observational studies have shown higher rates of preeclampsia, hyperbilirubinemia, and stillbirth with the use of glyburide, compared with insulin. However, many other outcomes have not been statistically significantly different, according to the practice bulletin.
Additionally, at least 4%-16% of women eventually require the addition of insulin when glyburide is used as initial treatment, as do 26%-46% of women who take metformin, according to ACOG.
Regarding placental transfer, ACOG’s bulletin said that while one study that analyzed umbilical cord blood revealed no detectable glyburide in exposed pregnancies, another study demonstrated that glyburide does cross the placenta. Metformin has also been found to cross the placenta, with the fetus exposed to concentrations similar to maternal levels, the bulletin noted.
“Although current data demonstrate no adverse short-term effects on maternal or neonatal health from oral diabetic therapy during pregnancy, long-term outcomes are not yet available,” ACOG wrote in the practice bulletin.
Concerns about research
As Thomas Moore, MD, sees it, the quality of available data is insufficient to recommend insulin over oral agents, or one oral agent over another. “We really need to focus [the National Institutes of Health] on putting together proper studies,” he said at the meeting.
In a later interview, Dr. Moore referred to two recent Cochrane reviews. One review, published in January 2017, analyzed eight studies of oral antidiabetic therapies for GDM and concluded there was “insufficient high-quality evidence to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions as to the benefits of one oral antidiabetic pharmacological therapy over another” (Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017 Jan 25;1:CD011967).
The other Cochrane review, published in November 2017, concluded that insulin and oral antidiabetic agents have similar effects on key health outcomes, and that each one has minimal harms. The quality of evidence, the authors said, ranged from “very low to moderate, with downgrading decisions due to imprecision, risk of bias, and inconsistency” ( Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017 Nov 5;11:CD012037 ).
Dr. Moore , professor of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cautioned against presuming that placental transfer of an antidiabetic drug is “ipso facto dangerous or terrible.” Moreover, he said that it’s not yet clear whether glyburide crosses the placenta in the first place.
Dr. Moore, Dr. Landon, and others at the meeting said they are eagerly awaiting long-term follow-up data from the Metformin in Gestational Diabetes (MiG) trial underway in Australia. The prospective randomized trial is designed to compare metformin with insulin and finished recruiting women in 2006. A recently published analysis found similar neurodevelopmental outcomes in offspring at 2 years, but it’s the longer-term data looking into early puberty that experts now want to see ( Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed. 2016 Feb 24. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2015-309602 ).
In the meantime, Dr. Landon said the “short-term safety record for oral antidiabetic medications is actually pretty good.” There are studies “suggesting an increased risk for large babies with glyburide, but these are very small RCTs [randomized controlled trials],” he said in an interview.
Data from population-based studies, moreover, are “flawed in as much as we don’t know the thresholds for initiating glyburide treatment, nor do we know whether the women were really good candidates for this therapy,” Dr. Landon said. “It’s conceivable, and it’s been my experience, that glyburide has been overprescribed and inappropriately prescribed in certain women with GDM who really should receive insulin therapy.”
Whether glyburide and metformin are being prescribed for GDM in optimal doses is another growing question – one that interests Steve N. Caritis, MD . The drugs are typically prescribed to be taken twice a day every 12 hours, but he said he is finding that some patients may need more frequent, individually tailored dosing.
“We may have come to conclusions in [the studies published thus far] that may not be the correct conclusions,” Dr. Caritis, who coleads obstetric pharmacology research at the Magee-Womens Research Institute in Pittsburgh, said at the DPSG meeting. “The question is, If the dosing were appropriate, would we have the same outcomes?”
This question came up at a recent workshop on gestational diabetes convened by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, said Patrick M. Catalano, MD , of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.
“We were asked, Are people using [oral antidiabetic medications] properly? Could the fact that glyburide may not have had the efficacy we’d hoped for [in published studies] be due to it not being used properly?” Dr. Catalano said.
Individualizing drug choice
Dosing aside, there may be populations of women who respond poorly to a medication because of the underlying pathophysiology of their GDM, said Maisa N. Feghali, MD , assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.
A study published in 2016 demonstrated the heterogeneity of the physiologic processes underlying hyperglycemia in 67 women with GDM. Almost one-third of women with GDM had predominant insulin secretion deficit, one-half had predominant insulin resistance, and the remaining 20% had a mixed “metabolic profile” ( Diabetes Care. 2016 Jun;39[6]:1052-5 ).
This study prompted Dr. Feghali and her colleagues to design a pilot study aimed at testing an individualized approach that matches treatment to GDM mechanism. “We [currently] have the expectation that all glucose-lowering agents will be similarly effective despite significant variation in underlying GDM pathophysiology,” she said during a presentation at the DPSG meeting. “But I think we have a mismatch between variations in GDM and the uniformity of treatment.”
In her pilot study, women diagnosed with GDM who fail dietary control will be randomized into usual treatment or matched treatment (metformin for predominant insulin resistance, glyburide or insulin for predominant insulin secretion defects, and one of the three for combined insulin resistance and insulin secretion defects).
The MATCh-GDM study (Metabolic Analysis for Treatment Choice of GDM) is just getting underway. Patients will be monitored for consistency of GDM mechanism and glucose control, and routine clinical variables (hypertensive diseases, cesarean delivery, and birth weight) will be studied, as well as neonatal body composition, cord blood glucose, and cord blood C-peptide.
