People who took a cheap diabetes drug after testing positive for COVID-19 were 40 percent less likely to develop lung disease. study said Friday.
The finding has been hailed as a potential “milestone” in the fight against the still little-understood condition, which causes the World Health Organization estimates affects 1 in 10 people who get COVID-19.
The study said it was the first randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial – considered the gold standard in research – to show that taking a drug can prevent long-term COVID.
It tested a drug called metforminoriginally developed from the French lilac flower, and has been the most widely used drug to treat type 2 diabetes around the world for decades.
This means that the drug is known to be safe, but also cheap and widely available.
The study included 1,126 overweight or obese people in the United States, half of whom received metformin and half a placebo in the days after testing positive for COVID-19.
After 10 months, 35 of the participants taking metformin were diagnosed with long-term COVID, compared to 58 for the placebo group, representing a 40 percent risk reduction.
The trial was conducted between December 2020 and January 2022, meaning it included the Omicron variant, which research has suggested causes long-term COVID at a slower rate than previous strains.
The team behind the COVID-OUT study had previously shown that metformin reduced coronavirus patients’ risk of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and death by more than 40 percent.
Carolyn Bramante, a researcher at the University of Minnesota and the lead author of the new study, told AFP that “our data show that metformin reduces the amount of SARS-CoV-2 virus” in patients.
The research has been published in the Lancet infectious diseases log.
‘in-depth’
Jeremy Faust, a Harvard Medical School physician who was not involved in the study, said in a linked comment piece that, if confirmed, the findings are “profound and potentially landmark” for long COVID.
Frances Williams, a professor of epidemiology at King’s College London, pointed out that 564 people had to take the drug “to prevent 23 hypothetical cases”.
“This means 24 people would have to take metformin to prevent one case of long-term COVID,” she said, adding that this was a lot of drugs to stop such a poorly understood condition.
The researchers cautioned that they were not testing metformin in people who had long been diagnosed with COVID, so the findings didn’t mean it could be used to treat the condition.
The study also found that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, which had been misinformed during the pandemic, and the antidepressant fluvoxamine failed to prevent long COVID.
It is estimated that tens of millions of people have had long-lasting COVID, with numerous and sometimes debilitating symptoms persisting or returning three months after infection and then dragging on for years.
The most common symptoms are fatigue, shortness of breath, and a lack of mental clarity called brain fog.
© Agence France-Presse
