Association of Preadmission Metformin Exposure and Incidence of Acute Kidney Injury Within 7 Days in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes in Intensive Care Unit: a Retrospective Cohort Study

Emerged as a major public healthy problem, Acute kidney injury (AKI) is now influencing millions of people worldwide and leading to reduced survival, increased progression of latent chronic kidney disease (CKD), and even new onset of CKD. More than half of intensive care unit (ICU) patients underwent AKI in a recent multinational cross-sectional study, often resulting in the need for renal replacement therapy with a high socio-economic impact for the patients.The effective precaution and treatment strategy remains limited.

As the most general and first-line biguanide antihyperglycemic drug, metformin has anti-inflammatory characteristics and is related with decreased all-cause mortality compared with other antihyperglycemics.. In some clinical trials and experimental studies conducted on divergent rodent models representing various types of kidney diseases going from AKI to CKD, metformin has been shown beneficial effects on the kidney. Moreover, preadmission metformin exposure is associated with a lower rate of 28-day mortality among AKI patients showed in several clinical studies.

However, in critical care patients with type 2 diabetes, the evidence of preadmission metformin usage decreasing a risk of AKI incidence is still absented. Therefore we performed a retrospective cohort study to validate the association of preadmission metformin exposure and AKI incidence in patients with diabetes in the ICU .