What is The META Trial?
The META Trial* is the largest trial of metformin conducted in Africa. It is aimed at identifying a low-cost intervention to prevent or delay onset of diabetes in individuals living with HIV and pre-diabetes, who are on antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the continent.
Not only will it produce globally relevant evidence on this question, but in ancillary studies, we will compare diagnostic methods for diabetes and use various clinical data to describe diabetes and HIV-related complications in this population. Developing clinical skills and capacity for conduct of clinical trials is central to the capacity development aims of the META Trial.
The project is supported by Global Health EDCTP3 and its members. Funded by the European Union under Global Health EDCTP3. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of Global Health EDCTP3 nor its members. Neither of the parties can be held responsible for them.
The project is part of the EDCTP2 programme (grant number RIA2018CO-2513 META-TRIAL) supported by the European Union; the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) in the United Kingdom where NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of EDCTP.
The META Trial has received financial and drug support from Merck Healthcare KGaA (CrossRef Funder ID: 10.13039/100009945).
The META Trial Partners
Persons who have diabetes first pass from a phase of normal glucose through to pre-diabetes before diabetes onset. Pre-diabetes strongly predicts the risk of developing diabetes. Studies in different populations have shown that 10-20% of subjects with pre-diabetes progress to clinical diabetes each year, and 70% of these individuals can expect to go on to develop overt diabetes during their lifetime.
