Can Metformin Make You Live Forever?
New headlines are claiming that this common diabetes drug can make women live longer, but the data is very unconvincing.
As a species, we are obsessed with living forever. And if forever doesn’t work, we at least want to live for a very, very long time. Longevity has become a huge industry worth billions of dollars. Society’s elite is now awash with people taking on an increasingly complex cocktail of supplements, drugs - some legal, some less so - and convoluted exercise/diet regimes to try and live longer lives.
One of the most talked-about pills in the longevity world is called metformin. Metformin is a drug that was originally developed to lower blood sugars in people with diabetes, and it’s great at doing that. It’s usually the first medical treatment that anyone with diabetes gets, because the drug is excellent at what it does and has few side-effects unless you have serious kidney issues.
And, according to new headlines, it can make you live longer. A new study is out that appears to show that this humble diabetes drug may be able to make older women live to exceptionally old ages.
The reality is, unfortunately, nowhere near as interesting as the hype. There is some indication that metformin may be better than some other diabetes drugs for very old women, but there’s not much else to take away from this new research.
Let’s look at the data.
The Study
The new paper has the rather heady title of Comparative Effectiveness of Metformin vs Sulfonylureas on Exceptional Longevity in Women with Type 2 Diabetes: Target Trial Emulation. This is a wonderfully complex and wordy title which covers something much more simple: a basic observational trial.
The authors of this research took an existing cohort of women called the Women’s Health Initiative. They restricted their sample to people recently diagnosed with diabetes aged over 60 years, and then conducted a statistical analysis comparing the risk of death for women who started taking either metformin vs another group of diabetes drugs called sulfonylureas. After controlling in their statistical model for a range of factors, they found that women prescribed sulfonylureas had slightly higher death rates than those who got metformin.
That’s it. The lifesaving miracle from the headlines was a 1.3% difference in death rates between women who got the sulfonylureas vs metformin.
These results are a bit meaningless to most people. The only people who you could claim have some stake in these findings are women over 60 who are diagnosed with diabetes for the first time. But even then, the sample is quite small and the findings are heavily confounded, so there’s no clear argument that metformin is better in this group anyway.
On top of this, there are other issues with this analysis. For example, metformin is the recommended first-line treatment already, something that has been true for decades. The main reason for skipping metformin when someone is diagnosed with diabetes is because they have kidney issues, something the authors of the paper did not control for in their analysis.
But all of that aside, there’s still not much interesting to know here. The study compared two diabetes drugs and found that one could be a bit better for people with newly-diagnosed diabetes, but that has essentially no impact on our understanding of metformin as a tool to extend your life. We already knew that metformin was beneficial for people with diabetes, and even that it was probably better than sulfonylureas for most people.
Bottom Line
Metformin is certainly a brilliant medication. It’s one of the few drugs that has very few negative impacts and does a great job treating a specific disease. If you have diabetes - or even prediabetes - there’s good evidence that metformin can improve your life.
Outside of those with high blood sugars, though, there’s just not as much evidence that it’s a useful thing to take. Metformin is also not without risk, and it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to just take on a whim.
If you are a woman over the age of 60 and your doctor has recently diagnosed you with diabetes, you might want to consider asking about these new study results. Or not, because there’s a good chance they’ve given you a prescription for metformin anyway.
For everyone else, these are ridiculous media headlines with no real basis. There’s no reason to believe that metformin can make women live dramatically longer lives just yet.