My husband is a Type 2 diabetic, at about normal body weight for a man his height. For about ten years, he managed his condition quite well with diet and exercise, but that stopped working a few months ago (we think stress from losing his job due to a plant closure is a major factor), and he’s been on metformin for a month now. Thankfully, he hasn’t had much trouble with the gastro-intestinal side effects :).
His fasting blood glucose checks have been getting steadily better over the time he’s been taking it, and now we’re seeing better post-meal checks. It seems that the situation is improving over time, and he’s been at the same dosage for a couple of weeks now.
Is that normal, are we seeing odd data, or is there some other factor we haven’t accounted for yet? Either way, it’s a relief that he’s doing better.
First…Yahoo! I’m envious in the extreme (wait, that’s second).
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, absolutely Metformin (in my experience) or any oral med for Type II can work for not only maintenance, but can be taken in smaller doses (or none, conceivably), as the rest of your body gets its shit together.
I don’t know, but my experience was that in the two years after I started using it, not only did my blood sugar and A1C get back to normal levels, but I lost about 20 lb without dieting. Apparently, that’s normal too. Since then I have dieted and lost another 40-45 lb. And my blood sugar is fine, but I see no reason to stop taking it.
Metformin is not without some potential side effects, though its been around for a very long time and has routinely been the 1st oral med given when diet and exercise are not enough. The key is the A1C results. Get that below 6.0 and your doctor should wean you off any oral medication. With Type II diabetes, when you feel better, have made the necessary lifestyle changes and the tests indicate your diabetes is under control there is no reason to continue medication.
See the image at http://cdn.streamzoo.com/si_12637137_urvwfr1tpm_lr.jpg for an illustration of the apparent effect of my job loss on my blood sugar levels. The graph starts at 2011, but if I were to include the data going all the way back to when I was first diagnosed n 2002, it would show mostly the same thing happening that this graph shows happening through 2011 and into most of 2012. These are mostly fasting levels, with a few post-meal levels thrown in here and there. The green lines show the range in which I want my fasting levels to stay, and as the graph shows, for the most part, they did stay in that range. The first red line represents the day that the announcement was made that the factory where I worked was going to close, and the second one is the day I actually lost my job.
In the time from well before the beginning of this graph, until the second red line, there has been no change in my general lifestyle. I was managing my diabetes only by being somewhat careful with my diet, and with the amount of exercise that I got on my job. But at the first red line, you can see that my blood sugar started going out of control. The only thing that changed was the general emotional stress of knowing that I was going to lose my job, and of continuing to work in a factory that I could feel dying all around me, and feeling like I was dying along with it.
According to the gastro who put my mother off metformin “this isn’t insta-medication like headache painkillers, it’s one of those whose effects take a while to kick in; that applies both to the good ones and the bad ones.”
