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Thursday, 21 February 2019

study on the usage of Metformin

Hi everyone,

I just found this survey that says there were no significant relation between metfomin and OS or PFS of glioblastoma patients, unlike those with grade III.

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/ijc.31783

 What do you think? Is there still any hope that they might not consider some aspect, dosage, etc that could challenge their data? I mean, is it still logical to include it in the cocktail? 
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2 comments:

  1. Stephen W21 February 2019 at 17:49

    The cocktail philosophy states that even a drug that has insignificant value in isolation may have additive or synergistic value in combination with other drugs (for example, the Care Oncology cocktail of drugs which includes metformin).

    The paper you linked to was an uncontrolled retrospective study, the weakest kind of clinical evidence. Most of those patients who were taking metformin were taking it as an anti-diabetes drug, not to fight their tumors, and "We were not able to perform dose-response analyses because information on duration and dose of medication intake was mostly lacking."

    For the grade 3 tumors, out of 231 total patients, only 11 were taking metformin, so that is pretty underpowered analysis.

    I wouldn't be surprised if even prospective clinical trials showed that single-agent metformin doesn't improve outcomes significantly, but that wouldn't be enough to stop me from including it in a multi-agent cocktail.

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  2. mstix22 February 2019 at 14:10

    We had it included in my husband's cocktail and I think it contributed to significant (unwanted) weight loss. Terminating its use seemed to have no detrimental effect and he has since regained about 10 pounds, as well as muscle mass. He continued with Prozac, Mirtazipine, and Celebrex, along with daily TMZ and Optune.

    He is now off the TMZ and Celebrex, as it has been over a year since starting them, and is doing fine.

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