In a previous study, scientists found that diabetic patients who took metformin lived 15% longer than matched non-diabetic patients who did not take metformin. Mechanistically, it is thought that metformin delays disease onset and promotes healthy aging. The scientific community now thinks that prophylactic metformin treatment may stave off age-related disease and thereby make people live longer, healthier lives. But will metformin exert a similar lifespan-extending effect in healthy people? Will it work the same in everyone? There are conflicting reports on metformin blunting the beneficial effect of exercise. This implies that there may be certain populations who will not reap the benefits or may even have adverse effects in response to metformin based on lifestyle and biological factors. Therefore, we seek to leverage the UK BioBank to stratify patients based on different lifestyle and genetic factors to observe if metformin elicits a differential effect on all-cause mortality. Specifically, we will cluster patients and observe whether BMI, sex, or the amount of exercise modulates the reported beneficial effects of metformin. Our findings will be of great interest for the general public since metformin is one of the most widely taken drugs in the world and more and more healthy persons are beginning to take metformin as a prophylactic measure to counteract aging and age-related disease. Thus, it is imperative to understand the specific populations that will and will not benefit from metformin.
