United States: A few prior clinical investigations have expressed apprehensions about the possibility of an increased risk of conceiving a baby with birth defects if women suffering from non-insulin-dependent or type 2 diabetes used metformin, a popular type 2 diabetes medication.
Other studies have recently emerged that have indicated that the consumption of the medication by males who intend to father a child or by women during the first trimester of pregnancy does not make them inclined to deliver a child with a serious birth defect, as CNN Health reported.
More about the news
The two new studies, released in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, differ from the 2022 study, indicating that metformin used by men in the three months prior to conception leads to a 40 percent increase in birth defects in their offspring.
The research results offer a measure of “assurance,” Rotem, who is the author of the new study on the paternal use of metformin and a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
He said, “Conventionally and traditionally, the mother has been the focus when it comes to pregnancy and when it comes to fetal health and the health of the newborn. What we are increasingly finding is that the father is also important,” as CNN Health reported.
He noted that the earlier studies linking particular medicines to raised possibility of delivery flaws could be connected to some extent to the disease of diabetes or other complications of diabetes rather than the drug.
According to him, “When we think about a medication, we also have to think about the underlying conditions in which the medication is usually prescribed,” and “We know that diabetes itself is tricky when it comes to both fertility and potential complications in pregnancy and in newborns.”
More about Metformin
Since 1960s, metformin is used as cmmonly prescribed drug for the treatment of type two diabetes, which is used to manage blood glucose levels in patients.
It is currently considered the first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes as an oral medication, and it is suggested that individuals should discuss with their healthcare provider the possibility of becoming pregnant, being pregnant, or breastfeeding before taking metformin, as CNN Health reported.
How was the Harvard study conducted?
To examine the association between paternal use of metformin at the time of conception and birth outcomes for the study, the investigators from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Kahn-Sagol-Maccabi Research and Innovation Center of Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel, collected information on over 400,000 infants born between January 1999 and December 2020.
It then matched that to what was known about the babies’ fathers, like their ages, laboratory results, and records of any medications they take, including metformin use.
Rotem said that even though the researchers did not really look into the specificity of how long men had been on the medication, “We did have many people who have been on the medication for a long time, and the results were pretty consistent for those individuals, too,” as CNN Health reported.
According to the research done by the researchers, the results revealed that about 4.7 percent of children who tested diabetes medications in the preceding months, it was 6.2 percent of children of fathers who were exposed to metformin before conception.
The other main alteration of investigation undertaken by the researchers included other health complications of the fathers, whether the mother had diabetes or other related complications, and whether the children were exposed to metformin in the first trimester of pregnancy.
By making these adjustments, it was found that exposure to metformin by fathers had no adverse effects on the development of major birth defects in the children.
Men who used diabetes medications during the spermatogenic journey up to conception were potentially older and more likely to have concomitant diseases compared to fathers who were not exposed to these medications. They are likely to have fertility issues, and more so, they have histories of smoking.