A Pharmacist's Perspective on Metformin Use and Cancer Outcomes

摘要

Having grown into the diabetes gold standard treatment, metformin trails an unsurpassed legacy of inexpensive safety and efficacy. This fact remains unaltered by the anecdotal risk of lactic acidosis, history of a feared and deadly outcome inherited from its medicinally engineered counterpart, phenformin. Upon this soon to be centennial of metformin's published evidence (1922-2022), the mechanisms and interplays of its beneficial effects, noticed rather recently by the oncology community, are yet to be fully elucidated.1"8 With a 1 in 2 lifetime chance of developing cancer among the sons and daughters of the obesity pandemic, metformin's unintended benefits in cancer have reached a rather difficult to ignore moment in time: a serendipitous "metformin age" for clinical oncology.