Hi, Ive been long term using avandia to control my symptoms along with glucor and metformin. Without the avandia I generally run around the 8-9 mmol/l 's mark (140-160mg/dl?) but I can nudge it down to 3-4mmol/l's where it should be with the avandia.
Now my doc's told me at my last review that avandia is being withdrawn from the market here because of heart problems in repeated study groups and all avandia using diabetics were to change to a alternative xelevia treatment.
He told me it would be exactly the same treatment, affect me in the same way etc and I would feel no difference.
So far, Ive read that they work the same as gliclazide rather than avandia, in that they drive the pancreas harder to produce more insulin, so theres the risk of going "too low" and a hypo, which there wasn't with the avandias.
On switching, I now get lots of horrid gas, it comes up through my throat and out the other end too, I went to the doc and he just offered me charcoal tablets which I pointed out to him was rather treating the symptoms than any potential cause.
Ive also had recently on two occasions rather severe vomitting episodes, that my stomache just HAD to evacuate everything, afterwards of course I had to stop taking meds and not eat anything for a few days, these have been attributed to a case of mild food poisening
, after a few days I got control of everything and slowly reintroduced food and felt much better.
So I decided to just stop taking the xelevia after the last sickness event as a test, and went back on just metformin and glucor, while my blood sugars are again higher than they should be (but not insanely high and reducing after eating etc) I havent been feeling sick.
Ive been told to reintroduce the xelevia, and here is where I am, I took the first one yesterday dinnertime after a week of feeling well, and Im now starting to feel queasy and a bit rough and my blood sugars are still in the elevated 8-10 region so its not a hypo or my body getting used to being in the normal range. If Im sick again tommorow, Im throwing the lot in the bin and if the doc wont listen Im changing doctors.
This has come at a really bad time for me, I would have stayed on avandia until the new year as I have a lot of work to get through on a self build housing project, plus the stress of xmas etc but I wasn't offered it as an option sadly.
So has anyone else made the jump between the two meds because of the concerns over avandia and heart problems? and what were your experiences.
