Diabetes Obes Metab: Metformin reduces the risk of hospitalization and death in diabetic patients with COVID-19

Since the beginning of 2020, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread globally, causing a pandemic that killed more than 4 million people in a year

In a study published in Diabetes Obesity & Metabolism, a leading journal in the field of metabolic endocrine diseases, researchers compared the association between metformin use and COVID-19 outcomes in a cohort of 31,966 diabetic patients in Lombardy

The researchers used the COVID-19 Linkable Administrative Region Database to select people with diabetes over the age of 40

In the multivariate model, metformin use was associated with overall mortality (OR, 0.

CONCLUSIONS: In this large cohort, metformin was associated with protective effects on clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19, suggesting that it may be a potential agent for preventing severe COVID-19 disease , although randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are needed to confirm this.