Effect of exogenously administered glucagon versus spontaneous endogenous counter-regulation on glycaemic recovery from insulin-induced hypoglycaemia in patients with type 2 diabetes treated with a novel glucokinase activator, AZD1656, and metformin

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Glucagon in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To study the effect of exogenous i.m. glucagon on recovery from controlled insulin-induced hypoglycaemia in patients with type 2 diabetes treated with the novel glucokinase activator AZD1656, in combination with metformin.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults, both men and women.

This was a single-centre randomized, open, two-way crossover phase I, automated glucose clamp (Biostator(®); Life Science Instruments, Elkhart, MD, USA) study (NCT00817271) in eight patients (seven men and one woman, mean age 58.6 years, body mass index 28.1 kg/m(2)).

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and crossover.

Because people in this Glucagon study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Each person switched between Glucagon and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

After an overnight fast on days 5 and 8, controlled hypoglycaemia was induced using an exogenous i.v. infusion of insulin.

This was sustained for 30 min, at the end of which the hypoglycaemic clamp was released.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Azetidines, Blood Glucose, Body Mass Index, Catecholamines, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Enzyme Activators and Fasting.

The authors tagged it with the keywords antidiabetic drug, phase I-II study and type 2 diabetes.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and crossover study of Glucagon.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2014 (Diabetes, obesity & metabolism), a journal based in England.

More context: the Glucagon compound page, all human trials.