Metformin may lower risk of glaucoma in elderly

Last Updated: 2015-06-04

By Lisa Rapaport

(Reuters Health) - Metformin, in addition to lowering blood sugar, may also reduce the risk of open-angle glaucoma, a new study suggests.

While the results can't prove the drug prevents glaucoma, researchers found that diabetics taking higher doses of metformin were less likely to develop glaucoma than those who used smaller doses or didn't take the drug at all.

Because metformin has more side effects at higher doses, more research is needed to better understand whether patients might benefit from taking more medicine just to ward off glaucoma, said senior study author Julia Richards, director of the glaucoma research center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

"Our hope is that if we can confirm the findings in diabetics, who clearly benefit from metformin for their diabetes, additional studies can be performed among persons without diabetes."

Richards and colleagues reviewed a database with a decade of health claims and prescription data for 40 million patients. They focused their analysis on a subset of about 150,000 people with diabetes who also had multiple eye exams to screen for glaucoma.

At the start of the study period in 2001, all of the patients were at least 40 years old and roughly half were 55 or older. Most of them were white.

Over the course of the study, about 6,000 people (4%) developed glaucoma. Patients over age 65 were three times more likely to be diagnosed with glaucoma than the youngest participants, aged 40 to 45.

After adjusting for age and other variables, the researchers found that people who took the equivalent of more than 1.5 grams of metformin a day for two years were 25% less likely to develop glaucoma.

Lower doses of the drug also appeared to reduce the risk of glaucoma, but not enough to rule out the possibility that this was due to chance.

Because the study reviewed insurance claims instead of randomly assigning some people to take the drug while another group got no treatment, the findings can't prove metformin prevents glaucoma, the authors acknowledge in the their May 28 paper in JAMA Ophthalmology.

"The findings are intriguing, though it is still too early to recommend that diabetics be given higher doses of metformin based on the study," said Dr. Pradeep Ramulu, a researcher at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

Since such a small percentage of people developed glaucoma over 10 years, Ramulu also noted that "the benefit of metformin is limited to the extent that it is lowering the risk of a rare event."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1AL1zri

JAMA Opthalmol 2015.