United States: According to a new finding, Metformin is the most common drug prescribed for type two diabetes to millions of Americans every year.
The study conducted by the scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose findings were published in Diabetes Care, described that the drug has the potency to lower the danger of developing long COVID, or in other words, post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), in diabetics.
More about the news
The drug, Metformin, brings down the blood sugar levels and is mostly prescribed as a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes. Moreover, the medicine is also prescribed off-label for weight loss and other metabolic conditions.
The latest outcomes of the study come from the ongoing RECOVER trial and build on results seen in a trial conducted in 2023, which had revealed that metformin lowers the danger of long COVID by a whopping 40 percent in 1,300 adults who were suffering from obesity. However, those participating were not diabetic, cidrap.umn.edu reported.
About the new study
In the latest study, the researchers wanted to see whether those positive effects still hold for those who are taking metformin for diabetes.
In the previously held studies, it was shown that individuals with type two diabetes are more susceptible to long COVID development.
The data used for the study was taken from the electronic health records related to two databases in order to perform a comparison of 75,996 adults taking metformin for their type 2 diabetes to those those13,336 records from patients who were not consuming metformin who were taking other kinds of diabetes drugs.
They further took into account the data from 51,385 adults, coming from the N3C data set, and 37,947 adult individuals, who were from the PCORnet data set.
The resulting findings showed that a long COVID diagnosis or death within the six-month lifespan of a confirmed COVID-19 infection, owing to death, precludes a diagnosis of PASC, the study authors explained.
In total, PASC diagnoses were noted in 1.7 percent of patients in the N3C of the data set and 1.3 percent in the PCORnet set.
About Metformin’s mechanism
The researchers noted that Metformin’s mechanism of action is still not well known to them,
According to the authors, “In addition to insulin-sensitizing effects, metformin fundamentally changes the metabolism within a cell and could decrease PASC via several mechanisms, including an attenuated inflammatory cascade, decreased viral persistence, and suppression of protein translation,” cidrap.umn.edu reported.
“These data support a mildly beneficial role of metformin on chronic SARS-CoV-2 outcomes in people with diabetes,” they inferred.