Actos and Ketoconazole
Drug interaction is a very delicate matter as it can be individual, revealing your individual reaction to co-administration of medications, and it can be quite typical, frequently occurring in different patients and therefore calling for special attention.
If you take Actos as your major anti-diabetic agent, it is especially important that your doctor should know what other medications you take because it may induce dose adjustment or even discontinuation of the drug.
One of the medications which interact with Actos negatively is Ketoconazole. Ketoconazole is a synthetic anti-fungal drug belonging to the drug class of imidazoles. It is used to treat fungal infections that can spread through the bloodstream. Most often these are topical infections such as athlete's foot, yeast infections of the mouth, skin, urinary tract, thrush, ringworm, jock itch and some infections that begin on the skin or in the lungs and gradually extend to other parts of the body. Ketoconazole functions by slowing the growth of the fungi that give rise to all these various types of infections which can spread through the whole body.
The use of Ketoconazole concomitantly with Pioglitazone is dangerous because it may gradually but dramatically decrease the effect of Pioglitazone thus making Actos inefficacious in its basic function as an anti-diabetic drug. Thus, your glycemic control can worsen due to the loss of the major medical property of Actos - that of increasing insulin sensitivity in the body. You will be liable to hyperglycemic episodes thus developing and aggravating grave complications of diabetes, including nephropathy, renal impairment, angiopathy, retinopathy and neuropathy. That is why it is an absolute necessity for you to discuss with your doctor optional variants of medications to substitute Actos or Ketoconazole with, depending on the results of clinical tests. The chances are great that you will have to discontinue one of these drugs because the degree of interference is known to be high. Which drug to replace should be decided with regard to your well-being, regular blood tests showing the degree of effectiveness of Actos in the course of treatment and compatibility of both drugs with equivalent agents.