Grant: Project Grant

Close to 50% of adults with intellectual disability (ID) are overweight or obese. One third of patients with ID are prescribed antipsychotic medications, which are known to cause significant weight gain, leading to obesity and other related diseases like diabetes. Weight gain is associated with poorer quality of life, decreased social engagement, worse medication adherence, and poorer brain function. Unfortunately, current treatments for managing obesity and other related risk factors for heart disease are inadequately studied in individuals with ID. Research has shown that the drug metformin helps to reduce the weight gain associated with antipsychotic drugs, but this has not yet been tested in adults with ID. Our preliminary findings show that metformin may be quite effective in reducing the weight gain associated with taking antipsychotic medication in adults with ID. We plan to study patients with ID who are overweight or obese and are taking antipsychotic medication to test metformin's ability to reduce body weight, and improve cardiovascular health. Participants will be randomly assigned to take either metformin or a placebo ("dummy") for 6 months. Neither patients nor study personnel know if placebo or metformin is being given. All participants will receive diet and lifestyle advice, and have their weight, blood pressure, and waist circumference measured at each visit. Participants will also do two MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans, one at the start of the study and one at the end, to measure abdominal fat. After the trial is over, all participants will be given the choice to continue taking metformin for an additional 6 months. We believe that the patients taking metformin will lose a greater percentage of body weight than those who were given the placebo, leading to improvements in other heart disease risk factors, physical health and quality of life.