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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Men who filled metformin prescriptions before or after the three-month period of sperm development did not have offspring with a higher incidence of birth defects, the study found.
what does that mean ? is there a season for sperm development ?
What the study shows is that if there's an effect it would have to be in the short time between the sperm developing and dying
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears to be prophylactic, it reduces the occurrence of long Covid in those recently testing positive.
Surely it would be like other antivirals(paxlovid) which have shown to help certain long Covid phenotypes? I.e. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9537824/ > Though not indicated for the treatment of PASC, the treating physician felt that her prolonged nasopharyngeal antigen positivity warranted the treatment. Indeed, the patient’s PASC symptoms fully resolved 3 weeks after completing antiviral treatment
Metformin affects glucose metabolism. It may be similar to how metformin seems to help with HIV infection; an immune cell infected with HIV goes into metabolic overdrive as it starts producing virus. Metformin seems to block that boosting mechanism through its effect on glucose, preferentially on the most over-driven cells. A similar story with certain glucose-fed cancers, which metformin is also used in treating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> said that metformin's benefit is at least partly mediated by a near fourfold reduction in viral load. But sure, COVID is a fat people disease.
It seems disingenuous to imply that the effects of COVID are not worsened by a high body fat percentage and / or poor physical health. COVID is not a fat persons disease, but as with most detrimental health episodes, the negative effects are greater in people with high body fat percentages.
> By day 300 of follow-up, 93 (8.3%) of 1,126 participants said they had received a diagnosis of long COVID by a provider. The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower.
Interestingly, half of the participants in the study (which took place starting in December of 2020) were unvaccinated. The researchers noted that metformin appears to have reduced the viral load greatly. I wonder if that is equally true for vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. It would seem plausible (not a doctor) that the reduction in viral load is related to the lower incidence of long COVID.
Now that we're in 2023, and pretty much everyone is either multiply-vaccinated or has had COVID, the study might turn out differently. If anyone has looked into the paper/data, I'd be interested to know whether the benefit is equal among vaccinated/non-vaccinated.
In my extended network of 1000+ people, I've heard of 2 that may have "long covid". Are people's experiences different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Men who filled metformin prescriptions before or after the three-month period of sperm development did not have offspring with a higher incidence of birth defects, the study found.
While more study is warranted, I believe the thesis is there is possibly a similar mechanism to how anti parasitics kill parasites during a specific window of their development cycle (with little effect outside of those windows).
TLDR: > By day 300 of follow-up, 93 (8.3%) of 1,126 participants said they had received a diagnosis of long COVID by a provider. The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower. Interestingly, half of the participants in the study (which took place s…
One thing to point out--this study provides the first really solid evidence that Long Covid actually exists.
From Derek Lowe:
"An overarching point, though, is made in a valuable commentary in the same issue of the Lancet by Jeremy Samuel Faust: this effect against a placebo control really shows us that there is something there. Long Covid is looking less like a cloudy mass of speculation and shoulder-shrugging, and more like a problem that medical science can start to unravel, using the tools we already have"
In my extended network of 1000+ people, I've heard of 2 that may have "long covid". Are people's experiences different?
Most likely, the majority of people who are damaged by COVID aren't cases severe enough to label as "long COVID", and often just passed off as having become more depressed due to social distancing, etc. except they then don't recover with lifestyle improvement.