Effect of Nicotinamide Mononucleotide on Retinal Thickness of Older Patients With Diabetes Mellitus: A Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind Study

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at NAD+.

The researchers aimed to evaluate retinal thickness changes after oral NMN administration according to the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) grid.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults, men only.

Before and 24 weeks after the study initiated, 240 × 240 mm macular cube scan optical coherence tomography images were obtained from male patients with type 2 diabetes aged ≥ 65 years with physical frailty; changes in the automatically measured mean retinal thickness within the 9 ETDRS grid regions were compared between groups.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this NAD+ study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received NAD+.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the NAD+ group a baseline to be compared against.

Retinal thickness changes at 24 weeks were compared between groups.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Retina, Tomography, Optical Coherence, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, Diabetic Retinopathy and Visual Acuity.

Author keywords: Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study grid, optical coherence tomography and retinal thickness.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of NAD+.

Its findings take up roughly 7 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2026 (Geriatrics & gerontology international), a journal based in Japan.

More context: the NAD+ compound page, all human trials.