Is Metformin related to Macular Degeneration in Diabetes patients?

There is no indication that metformin is linked to an increased risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) among type 2 diabetes patients in primary care, reports an article published in British Journal of Ophthalmology on 3rd February, 2022.

In affluent countries, late-stage age-related macular degeneration is the major cause of vision loss. Metformin has been linked to a lower incidence of AMD in several earlier studies, however the evidence is ambiguous. As a result, Krishna M Gokhale and colleagues undertook this research to investigate the link between metformin use and the development of AMD in type 2 diabetes patients in the United Kingdom.

IQVIA Medical Research Data, 1995–2019, was used to conduct a large, population-based retrospective open cohort study using a time-dependent exposure design. For this, patients under the age of 40 who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes were included in the study. Those provided metformin (with or without any other antidiabetic medications) were in the exposed group; those prescribed just other antidiabetic medications were in the comparative (unexposed) group. The exposure status was recorded at 3-monthly intervals and was handled as time changing. The adjusted HRs for the development of the outcome, newly diagnosed AMD, were calculated using extended Cox proportional hazards regression.