Published in:
16-02-2023 | Metformin | Letter
Drug target Mendelian randomisation: are we really instrumenting drug use?
Authors:
Emma L. Anderson, Dylan M. Williams
Published in:
Diabetologia
|
Issue 6/2023
Login to get access
Excerpt
To the Editor: In a recent publication in
Diabetologia, Zheng et al attempt to examine whether metformin use could reduce risk of Alzheimer’s disease using Mendelian randomisation (MR) [
1]. Drug target MR is a promising method for identifying drugs that we could repurpose for intervention in diseases other than those for which they were originally approved. MR has the potential to overcome some of the key limitations of observational pharmacoepidemiology, such as confounding, and it has previously been successfully applied to identify drugs for prioritisation in new clinical trials (e.g. IL-6 receptor antagonists for COVID-19 [
2,
3]). It is also particularly promising for a disease like dementia, where clinical trials for prevention are challenging due to the long (up to 20 years) prodromal phase. Given that dementia is currently the only leading cause of death globally with no effective treatments, we share the enthusiasm for what this method can potentially offer in this field. …
