Reply to letter to the editor: hypoglycemia and treatment with opioids
Résumé
We thank Brož et al. for their interest in our study aiming to determine if drug-induced hypoglycemia could be a class effect for opioids [1] and for their useful comments.
The French PharmacoVigilance Database (FPVD) contains a narrative description of cases provided by the declarant, which we examined for this study. The description of the report’s narrative in pharmacovigilance study is a complement to disproportionality analysis that may identify potential mechanisms underlying the associations found between drugs and adverse drug reactions. We are glad that they shared our interest in finding such mechanisms to further investigate the link between hypoglycemia and opioids. As they accurately mentioned, 45 of the 93 tramadol-associated hypoglycemia cases included in our descriptive study in the FPVD were related to diabetic patients. Indeed, hypoglycemia in these patients could have been favored by the antihyperglycemic treatment they received. We agree with them that sleepiness, one of the common side effect of opioids, combined to the use of those antihyperglycemic treatments could have been one of the factors leading to the onset of hypoglycemia in those patients. However, not all the reports mentioned sleepiness and the prescription of opioids appeared to be the trigger factor causing the hypoglycemia even in diabetic patients, regardless of the underlying mechanism.