An Old Diabetes Drug May Protect You Against Long COVID

Prescription drugs have a funny way of surprising us with new side effects—even if they’ve been on the market for decades. Viagra started as a treatment for high blood pressure before it was discovered to have stimulating effects for men. A common liver drug was recently found to help protect against the coronavirus. Now, another drug that protects against long COVID might soon join its ranks.

Researchers from across the U.S. published a pre-print on Dec. 24 that found that metformin, a commonly prescribed diabetes drug, might greatly reduce your chances of getting long COVID by more than 40 percent. While further research is needed to verify the clinical trial findings, it could help shed light on a very effective method of preventing the pernicious post-COVID symptoms that currently impact 1 in 13 adults in the U.S..

The researchers wanted to see if it was possible to identify any medications that might be able to prevent the onset of long COVID symptoms from manifesting even after the virus had been eradicated from the body.

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The team landed on three: metformin, ivermectin, fluvoxamine. The three drugs have exhibited anti-viral properties in past studies, though mostly with lab animals like mice and rats.

Fluvoxamine is an anti-depressant that has shown some signs of being able to treat COVID-19 after a patient is infected. The FDA even approved it as part of its emergency use authorization to treat non-hospitalized patients. Meanwhile, much has been ballyhooed about ivermectin—especially after people bought livestock versions of the drug—the drug has been widely disproved as an effective drug against COVID.

The new trial recruited 1,125 adults with COVID over the age of 30 who were predisposed to both COVID and long COVID due to obesity, and split them into six groups. Half received a dose of metformin with either a placebo or a combination of the other drugs. The other half received a placebo with either another placebo or the other two drugs.

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Then the volunteers were surveyed about their symptoms every 30 days for 10 months. By the end of the trial, the researchers found that roughly 8.4 percent of recruits got a long COVID diagnosis from their doctors. However, 10.6 percent of the control group were diagnosed with long COVID, while just 6.3 percent of the metformin group were diagnosed.

That’s a roughly 42 percent decrease in symptoms, which suggests metformin could be a very formidable drug against long COVID.

It’s worth highlighting that this is just preliminary data from one clinical trial. The authors emphasized that more research is needed in order to verify the efficacy and safety of the drug against long COVID.

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“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,” the researchers write. “Future research could also assess whether metformin is effective if started during an emergency department visit or hospitalization for COVID-19.”

For now it offers some promise for the millions of people throughout the world who have a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus and long COVID symptoms as a result. It also just goes to show that sometimes the best solutions are hiding in plain sight.

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