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Some type of medication used to treat diabetes may help manage the disease, but a new study recommends that doctors look for the disturbing signs of a serious flesh-eating infection in patients who take this medicine, or even kill it.
By United States today, the study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine examined the links between sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors, used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and a genital infection called Fournier gangrene, an "extremely rare but life-threatening" disorder, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which examined 55 cases of patients with the infection.
All of these patients had taken SGLT2 inhibitors between March 2013 and January of this year and they all became "critically ill," with a release mentioning hospitalizations, surgeries, and other complications.
Three patients died of Fournier gangrene.
In comparison, when the researchers examined patients taking other types of anti-glycemic agents over a 35-year period, they identified only 19 cases of Fournier gangrene on the whole of this period, with two deaths noted.
Last year, the FDA had warned of symptoms of the disease, including "sensitivity, redness or swelling of the genitals or genital area up to the rectum", as well as Fever over 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit and "a general feeling of being unwell."
The authors of the study advise physicians to be alert to these signs in patients taking SGLT2 inhibitors and to have "a high index of suspicion to recognize them at an early stage". (The man's necrotizing fasciitis caused him to lose much of his penis.)
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