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Comment by fswd | Hacker News Reader

only one mention of metformin, and it's a title to a paper in the references. however, diabetics who take metformin live longer than diabetics who didn't and nondiabetics in general. the paper didn't take that in consideration that some of the people could be on this seemingly diabetic drug

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I'm skeptical about your statement - diabetics who take metformin '.. live longer than non-diabetics in general'. I don't believe that is true. There is lots of research about metformin helping people, but making diabetics live longer than non-diabetics seems too far a reach. Can your provide a citation for this? I am not a diabetic, I tried to convince my doctor to let me take metformin but she thought there were some risks (such as a the recent papers on it causing birth defects in the children of men who were taking it - https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/28/health/paternal-metformin-use...

I'm not sure this is the best of sources, but it's a piece of information David Sinclair tends to bring up:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25041462/#:~:text=Conclusion....

I'm skeptical of the benefits claimed for non-diabetics: the 15% difference in median survival time between metformin-using diabetics and control "non-diabetics" may just indicate undiagnosed diabetes in the control population. The abstract doesn't say how the controls were selected, whether they were verified to not have diabetes or were simply people with no diabetes diagnosis.

Just search Hacker News for metformin: it is actually discussed quite a lot, and there are tons of posts about this effect (whether it is actually true or not I don't know, but like: the citations you seek are extremely easy to find if you just take a few seconds to look).

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