Safety and efficacy of insulin detemir vs. insulin NPH in pregnant women with diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Introduction: The relative efficacy and safety of insulin neutral protamine Hagedorn (NPH) and detemir (IDet), in the management of diabetes in pregnancy remains unclear. We sought to conduct an updated systematic review and meta-analysis to study the effect of NPH versus IDet during pregnancy on clinically relevant maternal and fetal outcomes.

Evidence acquisition: MEDLINE and Google Scholar were queried from inception till September 2022 for original studies comparing NPH with IDet for management of diabetes during pregnancy. Data was pooled using a random-effects model, to generate risk ratios (RR) for dichotomous outcomes and weighted mean differences (WMDs) for continuous outcomes, along with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). I² test was used to assess the magnitude of heterogeneity. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to explore the potential source of heterogeneity. As less than ten studies were included in our analysis, funnel plots were not made to evaluate publication bias. A P value of ≤0.05 was considered significant in all cases.

Evidence synthesis: Our search of the literature yielded 1087 articles initially, of which seven articles comprising 1396 patients, were included in our analysis. All included articles were of reasonably high methodological quality. Our pooled analysis demonstrates no statistically significant difference between the efficacy of insulin Detemir and insulin NPH as assessed by the HbA1c values from baseline. For safety outcomes, insulin detemir was significantly associated with a greater gestational age at delivery (WMD=0.39, 95%CI: 0.07 to 0.71, P=0.02) and lower incidence of hypoglycemic events (RR=0.64, 95%CI: 0.48 to 0.86, P=0.003) in-contrast to insulin NPH.

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that both, insulin IDet and insulin NPH have a similar efficacy in reducing HbA1c from baseline. However, insulin detemir was associated with lesser incidence of maternal hypoglycemic events and greater gestational age at delivery, compared to NPH.