A US study has found that adopting a healthy lifestyle is more effective than taking the commonly prescribed diabetes drug metformin in preventing the onset of type 2 diabetes, and the benefits last more than two decades.
Published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, the findings stem from the long-running US Diabetes Prevention Program, which began in 1996 and enrolled over 3,200 people with prediabetes across 30 institutions in 22 states. The study compared the long-term effects of lifestyle interventions, including exercise and a nutritious diet, with daily metformin use.
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According to the researchers from the University of New Mexico, the group that adopted lifestyle changes experienced a 24% reduction in the incidence of diabetes over the follow-up period, compared to a 17% reduction in the metformin group.
In the study’s initial years, the difference was even more pronounced: lifestyle changes reduced diabetes risk by 58% versus 31% for metformin. The interventions were so effective that the trial’s early phase had to be halted.
“The data suggest that people who didn’t develop diabetes early on remained diabetes-free even after 22 years,” said Dr. Vallabh Raj Shah, professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
Participants who embraced healthier lifestyles gained an average of 3.5 extra years without diabetes, while those on metformin saw 2.5 additional years.
“This reaffirms that lifestyle modification, not just medication, can be the most powerful tool in diabetes prevention,” Shah said.
