Health

You're Risking Diabetes When You Mix These Two Everyday Medications

July 1st 2016

It's never a good idea to mix medications, especially if the two drugs are a popular antidepressant and a drug commonly used to treat high cholesterol.

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When taken separately, the antidepressant paroxetine (marketed under the brand name Paxil) and the cholesterol drug pravastatin (sold as Pravachol) don't cause any harm. But taken together, it's a different story.

Mixing the two drugs can result in a potentially unhealthy rise in glucose levels and increase your risk of developing diabetes, a video from Business Insider reported.

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Patients' blood sugar levels increased on average by 19 mg/dl after they took both medications, according to a study in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics by researchers from Stanford, Harvard and Vanderbilt universities, which looked at 135 patients without diabetes.

Researchers also found that glucose levels increased in diabetic patients after they took both drugs.

Normal blood sugar level is anything between 70 and 100 mg/dl, physician Edward S. Horton told ABC.

You should be concerned if your glucose levels reach anything "higher than 130 mg/dl before a meal or higher than 180 mg/dl two hours after the first bite of a meal," according Wil Dubois from DiabetesSelfManagement.com.

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You are in danger of prediabetes if your blood sugar level hits anything above 100 mg/dl, depending on what you eat, according to the American Diabetes Association.

About 29 million people currently have diabetes, and one in four people don't know they have the it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Another "86 million adults have prediabetes, where their blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as Type 2 diabetes."

It is estimated that "1 million Americans take both paroxetine and pravasatin," Business Insider pointed out. 

You can watch the full Business Insider video here.

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[h/t Business Insider]

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