Actos Side Effects Continue to Pile Up

San Diego, CAActos side effects continue to plague Takeda Pharmaceutical's best-selling diabetes drug as a new study suggests that the medication also increases the risk of a specific eye disease that could cause blindness.

According to Bloomberg, the study, which was presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego, California, found that people taking the drugs were three-to-six times more at risk for developing the eye disease diabetic macular edema (DME), which swells the retina and can ultimately cause blindness.

DME, which the National Eye Institute says is the leading cause of blindness for Americans of working age, and the study authors wrote that patients with an elevated risk of suffering from the condition should avoid the medication at all costs.

Richard Donnelly, who led the study at the University of Nottingham, wrote that patients who are at the highest risk of developing the condition include those who lack strong control over their blood sugar levels and those with a prior history of DME.

Another swelling condition, pulmonary edema, has also been linked to the use of Actos and Avandia, another top-selling diabetes drug that will be pulled from pharmacy shelves in the US in November.

While Avandia has also been associated with an elevated risk of heart attacks, Actos has had its fair share of damaging studies lately, as the medication was also recently associated with the development of bladder cancer.

Citing an ongoing epidemiological study, the US Food and Drug Administration recently warned that patients who take Actos for more than one year may be at an increased risk of developing bladder cancer, which killed more than 14,600 people in 2010, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The bladder cancer warning from the FDA came less than one week after Germany and France banned use of the drug, according to MedPage Today.

As a result of these warnings, a number of physicians have already come forward saying they will no longer recommend the use of Actos for some patients suffering from diabetes, the news source said.

"I will ask my patients on Actos to consider dropping it and give them an alternative," Dr. Albert Levy of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, told the news source.