COVID-19: Can Metformin Drastically Reduce the Number of Deaths?

To address the current pandemic due to Sars-Cov-2, there are various strategies concerning social behaviors such as social distancing and lockdowns, vaccines, and targeted antivirals. Our further proposal is to identify an already existing drug that is safe and has therapeutic characteristics that are useful in terms of Covid-19. This drug is Metformin, the most widely used anti diabetic drug that has already been proven effective in areas other than that for which it was created and has demonstrated proven safety over many years of administration to a population of hundreds of millions of people. We review the medical literature attesting to the important characteristics of metformin as a drug against obesity, cancer, aging, and cognitive deterioration. The proposal to use metformin as an anti-Covid-19 drug, which would reduce morbidity, mortality, and organ damage, is based on its recognized ability to modulate and normalize the production of inflammatory cytokines, including interleukin 6, the overproduction of which, produced by the intra-abdominal fat in obese or overweight patients, is the cause of very serious outcomes in Covid-19 patients. To validate the above statement, we report a retrospective analysis carried out in Wuhan on patients hospitalized for Covid-19 from January 27, 2020 to March 24, 2020, in which diabetic patients treated with metformin and diabetic patients without metformin treatment were examined. At the time of admission, there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of sex, age, underlying disease, clinical severity, and oxygen support category. Anti-diabetic treatment with metformin was associated with a significant decrease in mortality, statistically four times less, than in diabetic patients not treated with metformin.