Metformin, ADT and Advanced Prostate Cancer

There has been a movement to find older and less expensive drugs and try to repurpose them for cancer treatment. One of the most common drug that is being evaluated for repurposing is Metformin.

Metformin is an inexpensive and commonly used drug for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) has been evaluated in a retrospective cohort of men with advanced prostate cancer.

The researchers have hypothesized that metformin plus androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) may be beneficial in when used in combination.

The researchers used national Veterans Affairs databases and identified all men diagnosed with advanced metastatic prostate cancer between 2000-2008 that were treated with ADT. They followed up the subjects through May of 2016.

They excluded men who were on ADT for ≤6 months or who had ADT concurrently with localized radiation. They developed three different patient cohorts: No DM, DM no metformin, and DM on metformin. They then calculated for overall survival (OS), skeletal-related events (SRE) and cancer-specific survival (CSS).

The research concluded that in men with advanced prostate cancer who used Metformin and received ADT had improved oncologic outcomes.

This was a retrospective trial and should be confirmed with a prospective clinical trial.

J Urol. 2018 Jun 22. pii: S0022-5347(18)43412-X. doi: 10.1016/j.juro.2018.06.031. [Epub ahead of print]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29940252?dopt=Abstract

PMID: 29940252