Research
Hormonal
Metformin is superior to acarbose for improving insulin resistance in normal weight patients, while both drugs are similar in overweight and obese patients.
If you are normal weight and newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, metformin may be a better choice than acarbose for improving your body's sensitivity to insulin.
GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
normal weight diabetic patients presented obvious insulin resistance... metformin treatment for 48 weeks significantly decreased HOMA-IR value by about 2.21 in normal weight group (P,0.05)... but acarbose did not present a similar improvement.
Why this rating
Randomized trial with clear statistical significance.
Source
MARCH2: Comparative Assessment of Therapeutic Effects of Acarbose and Metformin in Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes Patients
Guang Wang et al. · PLoS ONE · 2014
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0105698
rct · n=784Cited 23×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Acarbose and metformin provide similar HbA1c reduction and modest weight loss in newly diagnosed Chinese type 2 diabetic patients regardless of BMI status.Good
- In overweight patients, metformin is superior to acarbose for lowering fasting blood glucose, while acarbose is superior to metformin for lowering 2-hour post-challenge blood glucose.Good
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