Metformin improves cognitive impairment in patients with schizophrenia: associated with enhanced functional connectivity of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Cognitive impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia, which is aggravated by antipsychotics-induced metabolic disturbance and lacks effective pharmacologic treatments in clinical practice. Our previous study demonstrated the efficiency of metformin in alleviating metabolic disturbance following antipsychotic administration. Here we report that metformin could ameliorate cognitive impairment and improve functional connectivity (FC) in prefrontal regions. This is an open-labeled, evaluator-blinded study. Clinically stable patients with schizophrenia were randomly assigned to receive antipsychotics plus metformin (N = 48) or antipsychotics alone (N = 24) for 24 weeks. The improvement in cognition was assessed by the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB). Its association with metabolic measurements, and voxel-wise whole-brain FC with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) subregions as seeds were evaluated. When compared to the antipsychotics alone group, the addition of metformin resulted in significantly greater improvements in the MCCB composite score, speed of processing, working memory, verbal learning, and visual learning. A significant time × group interaction effect of increased FC between DLPFC and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)/middle cingulate cortex (MCC), and between DLPFC subregions were observed after metformin treatment, which was positively correlated with MCCB cognitive performance. Furthermore, the FC between left DLPFC A9/46d to right ACC/MCC significantly mediated metformin-induced speed of processing improvement; the FC between left A46 to right ACC significantly mediated metformin-induced verbal learning improvement. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that metformin can improve cognitive impairments in schizophrenia patients and is partly related to the FC changes in the DLPFC. Trial Registration: The trial was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03271866). The full trial protocol is provided in Supplementary Material.