After being authorised and available on the market, the medicines continue to be evaluated regarding their effectiveness when compared to other treatments available. Also, in some cases, a new therapeutic use can be identified and when it happens the medicine should also be evaluated for that. Real4Reg uses as an example a class of antidiabetic medicines (SGLT2 inhibitors) that were found to have beneficial effects on heart failure.
Diabetes is a very common disease in Europe. It is a chronic disease that can lead to several problems, such as vision problems, kidney failure, heart problems and, in the worst case, loss of life.
Whereas Type 1 Diabetes is a sudden and non-preventable disease that always requires the intake of insulin to survive, Type 2 Diabetes is preventable and could, in many cases, be controlled with oral medicines. There are several types of medicines for Type 2 diabetes. SGLT-2 inhibitors are a class of medicines for Type 2 Diabetes that became available in the European market about 10 years ago and since then, are widely used on patients with Type 2 diabetes. Recent studies discovered that these medicines are also associated with cardiovascular benefits, having started to be used on patients with heart disease without diabetes.
To find out more about diabetes and cardiovascular diseases:
Real4Reg will use the data from the real-world (national healthcare registers and claims data) to study the cardiovascular benefits of this medication when compared to other antidiabetic drugs that already exist. It will also explore if these new benefits found have changed the choice of doctors when prescribing a treatment for diabetes. Furthermore, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods will be used to construct tools to predict the effectiveness of the medicine for each individual patient.