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Patients taking Novo Nordisk’s anti-obesity jab sustained weight loss for up to four years and had a reduced risk of heart disease regardless of their weight, according to new research that adds evidence to the drug’s broader health benefits.
Two new studies published on Tuesday in Nature Medicine built on Novo Nordisk trial data first published in November, which found that patients using Wegovy had a 20 per cent reduction of risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.
One of the new studies based on the Select trial found that users of the drug over a period of three years and four months sustained their weight loss over four years, in a 17,604-person trial.
Participants in the trial lost on average 10 per cent of their body weight over the four-year period, and 7.7cm from their waist size.
The participants had obesity but not diabetes, and also had a history of cardiovascular diseases. Participants used 2.5mg of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy and Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic, on a weekly basis.
“This degree of weight loss in such a large and diverse population suggests that it may be possible to impact the public health burden of multiple obesity-related illnesses,” said Professor Donna Ryan, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who led the study.
The continued plateauing of weight for users of the drug could support broader use of the treatments by health services, said Simon Cork, a senior lecturer in physiology at Anglia Ruskin University, who was not involved in the study.
The UK health service at present limits availability of the drugs to overweight patients to two years, due in part to limited evidence on long-term cost-effectiveness of the drugs.
“We know that weight regain is very common in patients who stop taking semaglutide after this time but we didn’t [until now] have any safety data or proof that weight would remain off,” said Cork.
A separate analysis of the Novo Nordisk trial led by researchers at University College London and also being presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice this week, showed that treatment with semaglutide delivered cardiovascular benefits regardless of the starting weight of trial participants and the weight lost.
Professor John Deanfield, an academic at UCL, said: “Our findings show that the magnitude of this treatment effect with semaglutide is independent of the amount of weight lost, suggesting that the drug has other actions which lower cardiovascular risk beyond reducing unhealthy body fat.
“These alternative mechanisms may include positive impacts on blood sugar, blood pressure, or inflammation, as well as direct effects on the heart muscle and blood vessels, or a combination of one or more of these,” he said.
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