抄録
Acarbose, an α-glucosidase inhibitor, is a well-established treatment of diabetes mellitus. Unfortunately, acarbose has one very frequent side effect, namely increased flatulence, which can interfere with its continuous administration. However, we still do not clearly know how long this side effect continues for the administration of acarbose despite several previous reports about this unpleasant adverse reaction. A major reason why its duration was obscure in such studies was that its duration was not accurately evaluated due to the fact that all subjects were ambulatory patients. Therefore, we monitored the daily flatulence among 48 diabetic inpatients treated with acarbose. As a result, we clarified that this system continues for a shorter period (12.8±1.3 days) than reported in previous studies. In addition, we found that obese patients are very frequently complicated with increased flatulence after taking acarbose since the BMI was significantly higher in the increased flatulence group than in the non-increased flatulence group with acarbose (25.1±0.7 vs 22.3±0.9).
