Steve Johnson, PhD, CTSI’s Scientific Director of Clinical Informatics and former KL2 scholar Carolyn Bramante, MD, MPH, are the PIs of a recent research paper that supports previous studies of metformin’s reducing the risk of Long COVID.
The research team found that adults who use the prescription drug metformin to treat their type 2 diabetes have a lower risk of developing Long COVID or dying after a COVID-19 infection than those who take other anti-diabetes medications
The paper, “Prevalent Metformin Use in Adults With Diabetes and the Incidence of Long COVID: An EHR-Based Cohort Study From the RECOVER Program,” was published in the journal Diabetes Care this week.
The researchers compared the incidence of death and Long COVID within six months after SARS-CoV-2 infection in adult patients with diabetes treated with metformin versus those treated with other anti-diabetes medications. They found that patients taking metformin had about a 13 to 21 percent lower incidence of Long COVID or death than those in the non-metformin group.
Leveraging national health record databases
An earlier clinical trial from Dr. Bramante showed metformin lowers the risk of getting long COVID among adults who qualified as overweight or obese. To see if the drug had a similar effect in people with diabetes, researchers examined electronic health record (EHR) data for nearly 38 million Americans from two large U.S. databases: the (National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) and the Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) electronic health record (EHR) databases).
The study was performed retroactively by comparing health record data from 75,996 adults taking metformin for their type 2 diabetes to 13,336 records from patients who were not taking metformin but were using other types of diabetes medicines.
To access clinical and genomics data for your research, consult with CTSI’s informatics team.
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