Anti-Rejection Drugs After Transplant, Increase Diabetes Risk: Study

Treatment with Sirolimus – a relatively new immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation - may actually lead to an increased risk of diabetes later on in kidney transplant recipients, a team of researchers has found.

For the study the researchers scrutinized data of about 20,000 Medicare patients who had undergone kidney transplants between 1995 and 2003.

While no patient reported to be diabetic before their respective kidney transplants, sirolimus usage was strongly associated with a 36 percent to 66 percent increased risk of diabetes after transplant, researchers noted.

Being the first large clinical study to study the association between anti-rejection drug, Sirolimus and diabetes in transplant patients, Dr. John S. Gill, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, stated, “We demonstrated a robust association between sirolimus and diabetes after transplantation in a large group of kidney transplant recipients in the United States. The risk of diabetes was independent of other factors that are known to increase the risk of diabetes."

Though no association between Sirolimus usage and development of diabetes in transplant recipients was seen earlier, ‘a number of animal studies and small clinical studies have suggested that sirolimus may increase the risk of diabetes," Gill revealed.

"Patients who develop diabetes after transplantation have roughly the same risk of transplant failure as patients who develop acute transplant rejection," Gill concluded.

Further research is required to clarify the links between risk of diabetes and sirolimus-treated patients, he added.

The results of the study are expected to be published in the July issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Diabetes is a syndrome characterized by disordered metabolism and abnormally high blood sugar resulting from insufficient levels of the hormone insulindefine. Severe diabetes can cause serious long-term complications like cardiovascular disease, renal failure, retinal damage - thus leading to permanent blindness. Apart from hereditary factors, other risk factors including age, obesity, and lifestyle play a major role in acquiring diabetes.

A relatively new drug possessing potent immunosuppressive and antiproliferative properties, Sirolimus is a macrolide first discovered as a product of the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus in a soil sample from an island called Rapa Nui.