Per the Wall Street Journal Health Blog's Jacob Goldstein:
. . . .The FDA said today it had received 88 reports of pancreatitis in patients taking Januvia® and Janumet®, a related drug that combines Januiva® with the diabetes medicine metformin. The agency didn’t report any deaths in cases of pancreatitis in patients taking the drugs, but 66% of the cases did require hospitalization. In 21% of cases, pancreatitis occurred within 30 days of starting Januvia or Janumet; 53% of the cases resolved once after the drug was discontinued. . . .
Merck’s sales of Januvia® (sitagliptin) and Janumet® totaled more than $1 billion in the first six months of this year. . . .
Stay-tuned. . . . but, for its part, Merck says that pancreatitis risk is an inherent condition in many, many Type II diabetic-patients, and thus the reported pacreatitis cases may simply be a by-product of the disease, not the drug used to treat it.
It is interesting that, in more than half of the reported cases, the pancreatitis subsided after the patient stopped taking Januvia or Janumet, though.
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