A Meta-Analysis on Adverse Event Reporting across Clinical Trials within Diabetic Drug Classes over Time

Diabetes is a serious disease that affects millions of people, with new drugs and therapies being added to the market every year. In this paper, we sought to analyze the adverse events reported in clinical trials for these new medications and observe any trends within the different drug classes. Searching FDA Access Data for clinical trial data using a Cochrane method, we plotted there ported incidence of several common adverse events for diabetes medications in the same drug class overtime. Our meta-analysis showed varying trends, both upward and down ward, for adverse events such as nausea and abdominal pain for dipeptidylpeptidase-4(DPP-4) inhibitors and urinary tract infection, pain with urination, dehydration, increase in urination, and genital fungal infections for sodium-glucose cotransporter-2inhibitors (SGLT2). Due to these moderate to strong correlations with time, we believe that having previous drugs in the same therapeutic class on the market could impact adverse event reporting in future clinical trials on new drugs, but this question requires further research.