How one diabetic drug is beneficial for all revealed

A new study has revealed that widely prescribed diabetic drug, metformin, could provide health benefits to both type 2 diabetics as well as people without the disease.

The findings indicated that a drug used to control glucose levels in the body and already known to exhibit anticancer properties, could offer prognostic and prophylactic benefits to people without diabetes.

The study also suggested that patients treated with the drug for diabetes type 2 could live longer than people without the condition.

Professor Craig Currie from Cardiff University's School of Medicine said that Patients treated with metformin had a small but statistically significant improvement in survival compared with the cohort of non-diabetics, whereas those treated with sulphonylureas had a consistently reduced survival compared with non-diabetic patients.

He further explained that the findings indicated that this cheap and widely prescribed diabetic drug may have beneficial effects not only on patients with diabetes but also for people without, and people with type 1 diabetes and it also have anti-cancer and anti-cardiovascular disease benefits, in fact it could also reduce pre-diabetics' chances of developing the disease by a third.

It was also suggested that this does not mean that people with type 2 diabetes get off Scott free as their disease would progress, so the best way to avoid the condition altogether would be by keeping moderately lean and taking some regular light exercise.

The study is published in a leading diabetes journal, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.