Metformin use linked to lower risk for rare blood cancer
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Key takeaways:
- Metformin use associated with lower risk for developing myeloproliferative neoplasms.
- Long-term use of metformin showed the largest overall risk reduction.
Individuals prescribed the antidiabetes treatment metformin less likely developed a myeloproliferative neoplasm —potentially also reducing a person’s chances for developing certain cancers — according to data published in Blood Advances.
Metformin is a therapy used by patients with type 2 diabetes to treat high blood sugar by increasing the efficacy of insulin.
Prior research suggests that metformin may have had beneficial effects for this specific patient population beyond the initial understanding of being able to lower glucose levels.
Therefore, researchers sought to investigate the potential association between metformin use and the risk for myeloproliferative neoplasms.
“Our team was interested in understanding what other effects we see with commonly prescribed treatments like metformin,” Anne Stidsholt Roug, MD, PhD, chief physician at Aarhus University Hospital and clinical associate professor at Aalborg University Hospital in Denmark, said in an ASH-issued press release. “The anti-inflammatory effect of metformin interested us, as [myeloproliferative neoplasms] are very inflammatory diseases. This is the first study to investigate the association between metformin use and risk [for myeloproliferative neoplasms].”
Researchers conducted a population-based case-control study including 3,816 patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms diagnosed between 2010 and 2018 and who also had information on metformin use prior to diagnosis compared with 19,080 controls.
Researchers determined 7% of cases and 8.2% of controls to be categorized as ever-users of metformin, resulting in an OR of 0.84 (95% CI, 0.73-0.96) for myeloproliferative neoplasm and an adjusted OR of 0.7 (95% CI, 0.61-0.81).
Long-term metformin use, determined as at least 5 years of use, resulted in an OR of 0.57 (95% CI, 0.42-0.79) and an adjusted OR of 0.45 (95% CI, 0.33-0.63).
Researchers determined that metformin use appeared to significantly lower odds of a myeloproliferative neoplasm diagnosis, showing a potential cancer-preventive effect.
“We were surprised by the magnitude of the association we saw in the data,” Daniel Tuyet Kirstensen, MD, PhD student at Aalborg University Hospital and lead author of the study, said in the release. “We saw the strongest effect in people who had taken metformin for more than 5 years as compared [with] those who had taken the treatment for less than a year.”
References:
- Anti-diabetic treatment associated with reduced risk of developing blood cancer (press release). Available at: https://www.hematology.org/newsroom/press-releases/2024/anti-diabetic-treatment-associated-with-reduced-risk-of-developing-blood-cancer. Published May 17, 2024. Accessed May 17, 2024.
- Kristensen DT, et al. Blood Adv. 2024;doi:10.1182/bloodadvances.2023012266.
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