Metformin: Useful diabetes drug to prevent long-term Covid

Discovery and favorable trials. Metformin, a cheap and widely available diabetes drug, will reduce the risk of contracting Covid long after testing positive for Covid, according to a study published Friday. The World Health Organization reminds that a still mysterious disease that is dragging on over time affects one in ten people who become infected with Covid.

Metformin was studied in a phase 3, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Originally developed from the French lilac flower, it has been the world’s most commonly used treatment for type 2 diabetes for decades. This means that it is considered safe as well as inexpensive and widely available.

Promising results

The study, published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, followed 1,126 overweight or obese people in the United States, with half receiving metformin and the other half receiving a placebo within days of testing positive for Covid. After 10 months, 35 participants taking metformin were diagnosed with long-term Covid compared to 58 in the placebo group, representing a 40% risk reduction. The study was conducted between December 2020 and January 2022, meaning it included a variant of Omicron that would cause fewer long-term Covid-19s than previous strains, the study says.

The study team had previously shown that metformin reduced the risk of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and patient death by more than 40%. “Our data show that metformin reduces the amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus in patients,” Carolyn Bramante, a researcher at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the new study, told AFP.

If confirmed, these results would be “potentially significant” for long-term Covid studies,” said Jeremy Faust, a Harvard Medical School physician who was not involved in the study, in a comment. Francis Williams, professor of epidemiology at King’s College London, notes, however, that 564 people had to take the drug to “avoid 23 hypothetical cases” of prolonged Covid. This means that “24 people took metformin to prevent one case of prolonged Covid.”

The researchers clarified that the drug has not been tested on people who have been ill with Covid for a long time, and therefore cannot be used to treat this disease, but only to prevent it. That the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, about which misinformation has circulated throughout the pandemic, as well as the antidepressant fluvoxamine, did not prevent prolonged Covid.