Could a common diabetes drug help prevent long COVID? Trial shows promising results
An old and commonly prescribed diabetes medication may help significantly lower the risk of developing long COVID, recently released drug trial data show.
The trial, conducted by a team of researchers at universities across the United States, enrolled over 1,100 adults between 30 to 85 years old who had been recently diagnosed with COVID-19, according to the preprint study shared on Dec. 24.
Participants were divided into groups, with some receiving the diabetes drug metformin, some receiving placebos, while others took other drugs researchers were curious about: ivermectin and fluvoxamine.
Metformin has seen widespread use in Europe since the 1950s but wasn’t approved by the FDA to be used in the U.S. until 1995, according to a 2021 article by Harvard Medical School.
“It has since become the most widely prescribed medication for people with diabetes who cannot control their blood sugar through diet and exercise alone,” the article said.
Over the course of 10 months, researchers kept tabs on participants, and when they tallied the results at the end, 8.4% reported being diagnosed with long COVID by a medical provider, the study said.
However, only 6.3% of those in the metformin group had a long COVID diagnosis, compared to 10.6% in the control group — meaning the rate of long COVID was 42% lower among those who took metformin for the trial.
The results for the ivermectin and fluvoxamine groups were less promising, seeing rates of long COVID at around the average or higher than the control groups.
Metformin is considered safe to use for most people, diabetic or not — with the exception of people with kidney disease — with few, rarely occurring serious side effects, according to Harvard Medical School.
Authors of the study say more work needs to be done before they can say for certain whether metformin can or should be used to curb the risk of long COVID.
“Future research is needed to understand optimal dosing regimens for preventing Long Covid, whether extended release is effective in persons who have side effects from immediate release metformin, and whether metformin could be used as a treatment for Long Covid. Future research could also assess whether metformin is effective if started during an emergency department visit or hospitalization for Covid-19,” the study said.
Further, the nature of long COVID itself adds a layer of uncertainty to the research, as there’s still much the medical community doesn’t understand about the condition. Symptoms can vary widely from one patient to the next — lasting weeks or months, sometimes mild, other times debilitating.
It’s also unclear exactly how common it is, with estimates on the chance of COVID sufferers developing long-term symptoms ranging from 5% to 30%, according to the CDC.
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