Comparative Effectiveness of Cardiovascular Outcomes in New Users of SGLT-2 Inhibitors (CVD-REAL)

Type 2 diabetes mellitus remains a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease with an estimated 425 million adults worldwide having diabetes in 2017, with type 2 diabetes mellitus accounting for about 90% of the cases. Recent evidence indicates that certain glucose-lowering therapies are associated with reduction in cardiovascular outcomes. There is, therefore, an urgent need to improve the understanding of the impact of newer classes of glucose-lowering therapies, such as dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists and sodium-glucose co-transporter-2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors on cardiovascular outcomes in clinical practice.

CVD-REAL is a comparative effectiveness study that aims to compare new users of SGLT-2 inhibitors with new users of other glucose-lowering drugs with regard to the risk of all-cause mortality and clinically relevant CV outcomes (including stroke, myocardial infarction, and hospitalization for heart failure) respectively. The study is based on data from 12 countries across four major world regions.

The study is conducted using data from claims, medical records and national health registries from twelve countries combined in two waves. CVD-REAL 1 includes Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom (UK) and United States of America (USA). CVD-REAL 2 comprises Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. The study will collect data from approximately 4 million patients from the time they start treatment with a SGLT-2 inhibitor or another glucose-lowering drug (index date) to the end of the follow-up period.

The Study Population will consist of new users of SGLT-2i and other glucose lowering drugs respectively. These will be compared with all-cause mortality, hospitalization for heart failure, myocardial infarction and stroke during the follow-up period. In addition certain other cardiovascular and renal outcomes will be assessed descriptively in the two groups respectively.

The study period will range from launch of the first SGLT-2i in each of the countries and end at latest available data in each data source.

All-cause mortality and the incidence of cardiovascular events will be compared between new users of SGLT-2 inhibitors and the comparator arm using a hazard ratio (relative risk) and corresponding 95% confidence interval. The analysis will be performed using the Cox proportional hazards model or some other appropriate method.

Matching by propensity scores will be used to balance the potential confounding covariates between the SGLT-2i group and the reference group to ensure that the two groups are as similar as possible at baseline.To achieve sufficient power, a meta-analysis will be applied to integrate the point estimates from each of the individual database analyses and calculate an overall weighted estimate and corresponding 95% CI.