Metformin use and survival in people with ovarian cancer: A population-based cohort study from British Columbia, Canada

Objectives

There is an active debate regarding whether metformin use improves survival in people with ovarian cancer. We examined this issue using methods designed to avoid immortal time bias—as bias that occurs when participants in a study cannot experience the outcome for a certain portion of the study time.

Methods

We used time-dependent analyses to study the association between metformin use for all 4,951 patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1997 through 2018 in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Cox proportional hazards models were run to estimate the association between metformin and survival in the full cohort of ovarian cancer patients and among a cohort restricted to patients with diabetes.

Results

Metformin use was associated with a 17 % better ovarian cancer survival in the full cohort (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) = 0.83 (95 %CI 0.67, 1.02)), and a 16 % better ovarian cancer survival for serous cancers patient's cohort (aHR = 0.84 (95 %CI 0.66, 1.07)), although both were not significant. However, a statistically significant protective effect was observed when restricting to the diabetic cohort (aHR = 0.71 (95 %CI 0.54–0.91)), which was also seen among serous cancers (aHR = 0.73 (95 %CI 0.54–0.98)).

Conclusion

Metformin use was associated with improved ovarian cancer survival. The lack of statistical significance in the full cohort may reflect that diabetes is associated with reduced cancer survival, and thus diabetes itself may offset the benefit of metformin when examining the full cohort. Future research should examine metformin use among non-diabetic ovarian cancer patients.