Prof. Groop (Helsinki, Finland)

This first slide shows exactly what it’s all about with linagliptin. It’s an efficacious glucose-lowering drug. You can see here, if you start at an A_1c level of about 9.0%, you can expect a 0.8% placebo-corrected reduction. So it is efficacious; however, the effect is always larger if you start higher up in terms of A_1c and this is not unique for linagliptin – this is basically the same for any glucose-lowering medication.

If you add on linagliptin to metformin, you can see, there is a powerful A_1c reduction on the left. You can see, [with] linagliptin 2.5 mg twice daily plus metformin 500 mg twice daily: 1.3% reduction in A_1c. But if you double the dose of metformin: 1.7% [reduction]. This is when you have an A_1c level at baseline of 8.7% but as I was alluding to already, if you start higher up you can also expect a much larger effect of the reduction.