[Secondary failures in modern therapy of diabetes mellitus with blood glucose lowering sulfonamides (author's transl)].

The analysis of the case histories of 914 diabetics exclusively treated with blood glucose lowering sulfonamides in a university clinic outpatient station yielded an annual secondary failure rate of 5-10 p.c. Cumulative incidence calculations showed a continuous increase of secondary failure depending on the duration of treatment. Thus less than 20 p.c. of the diabetics have a chance of a satisfactory long-term therapy after 10 years of treatment. Any dependency of secondary failure from age at onset of diabetes could not be proved. Both "old" and "new" sulfonamide derivatives were equally subject to secondary failure. Changing the treatment from a therapy using grammscale derivatives to any of the modern milligramm-scale substances has been more or less equally "successfull" but lastly unsatisfactory. Diabetics with secondary failure show more overweight than patients with positive long-term treatment