Weight loss drug could reduce heart attack risk by 20%, study finds

xhieron, 15 days ago

This is fantastic news, but they kind of buried the lede here:

A separate study looking at a new slimming jab has found that it could be much more effective than those already on the market. Retatrutide, a weekly injection, works by suppressing appetite and also by helping the body burn more fat, according to its phase 2 clinical trial.

The trial of 338 participants living with obesity showed that participants lost 24% of their body weight over a 48-week period. [emphasis added] Researchers say it is more effective for weight loss than Ozempic or Wegovy, which only work by suppressing appetite.

That’s a quarter of a person’s mass in less than a year. For persons with obesity, that’s absolutely insane. It’s better than gastric bypass surgery (and depending on your perspective, comparing risk of complications, long-term compliance requirements, and potential side effects, semaglutide already is). It would be like taking semaglutide and also taking meth for a year, but without ruining your life.

Now if only the taxpayers who paid for the research owned the patent. …

Gigan, 15 days ago

Is this because people taking it lost weight or would there be a benefit for everyone, even people already at healthy weight?

UndercoverUlrikHD, 15 days ago

In a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, event-driven superiority trial, we enrolled patients 45 years of age or older who had preexisting cardiovascular disease and a body-mass index (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) of 27 or greater but no history of diabetes.

Results

A total of 17,604 patients were enrolled; 8803 were assigned to receive semaglutide and 8801 to receive placebo. The mean (±SD) duration of exposure to semaglutide or placebo was 34.2±13.7 months, and the mean duration of follow-up was 39.8±9.4 months. A primary cardiovascular end-point event occurred in 569 of the 8803 patients (6.5%) in the semaglutide group and in 701 of the 8801 patients (8.0%) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% confidence interval, 0.72 to 0.90; P<0.001). Adverse events leading to permanent discontinuation of the trial product occurred in 1461 patients (16.6%) in the semaglutide group and 718 patients (8.2%) in the placebo group (P<0.001).

Conclusions

In patients with preexisting cardiovascular disease and overweight or obesity but without diabetes, weekly subcutaneous semaglutide at a dose of 2.4 mg was superior to placebo in reducing the incidence of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, or nonfatal stroke at a mean follow-up of 39.8 months.

(Funded by Novo Nordisk; SELECT ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT03574597.)

The paper.

Gigan, 15 days ago

Ah thanks, so it was only tested on overweight people with existing heart issues.

Rolando, 15 days ago

I don’t know much about medical research, but it seems like they’re not really testing whether the benefit comes from the weight loss or from some other mechanism. i.e. if the subjects could lose weight through some other means, would they still gain the benefit?