A two-drug combination has been found to beat convention medication, when it comes to managing diabetes, and also offers users a beneficial side effect: Greater weight loss.

A multinational clinical trial led by University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that combining a new long-acting insulin with another drug improved glucose control in Type 2 diabetics and helped them shed pounds.

The trial compared diabetics who received daily injections of either basal insulin glargine or IDegLira, which is a mixture of insulin degludec and liraglutide, a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist that stimulates cells in the pancreas to produce insulin.

The study findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found the two-drug combo to be far superior than use of a single drug alone.

"Many patients who are on an oral agent and basal insulin are unfortunately not [managing their blood sugar well]. Treatment options for such patients are to either increase the basal insulin dose or to add additional shots of insulin at mealtimes. The downside of both of these approaches is weight gain and hypoglycemia (low blood sugar)," said the study's lead researcher Dr. Ildiko Lingvay.

"The clinical trial found that participants treated with the combination product had more improvement in their HbA1C (hemoglobin A1C) test than those treated with basal insulin alone, they had weight loss rather than weight gain, and they had many fewer episodes of hypoglycemia."

The trial, conducted from September 2013 to November 2014, involved 557 participants with uncontrolled Type 2 diabetes in 75 treatment centers in 10 countries. At the time they enrolled, study participants were taking the oral diabetes medication, metformin, as well as basal insulin glargine.

Participants were then randomly assigned to continue on insulin glargine or to switch to daily injections of IDegLira.

Participants who took the combination product saw their glucose levels drop faster and lost an average of about three pounds compared with an average weight gain of nearly 4 pounds for the one-drug glargine group.

"Patients on IDegLira did better overall, especially when factoring in weight loss and decreased hypoglycemia risk," said Dr. John Buse, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and senior author of the study.