Study: Weight-loss drug has major heart benefits
Many people who are obese also have heart disease, and the latest research confirms that new weight-loss medications may help with both.
Trial subjects with both obesity and a condition called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction saw significant benefit from taking the drug semaglutide for a year, a Friday study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed.
Previous studies of weight loss in patients with heart failure didn’t show the same benefit, suggesting that the mechanism of this new type of drug makes a difference, said Dr. Nishant Shah, a preventive cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, who described the cardiovascular benefit of this type of medication as “profound.”
Losing weight, Shah said, can also make it easier for people to be active, which can help their heart even more.
Roughly 1% to 2% of Americans have heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and studies estimate that up to 80% of them also meet the definition of obesity or overweight.
New class of drugs for diabetes, weight loss
Semaglutide is part of a new class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists developed to treat diabetes but is now also used to treat weight loss.
Novo Nordisk, which funded both recent trials, sells semaglutide for diabetes under the name Ozempic and for weight loss as Wegovy. Both drugs have been in short supply for most of the last two years and remain difficult for many people to get, particularly at the lower, initial doses.
The Eli Lilly drug Mounjaro, a GLP-1 drug that also acts in a second way and may lead to even more weight loss, is currently only approved to treat diabetes. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to consider its approval for weight loss later this year.
Other companies are developing other drugs in the same class.
“These drugs really help us enhance strategies towards modifiable risk factors,” Shah said. “We can’t control our genetics. We can’t control our age. To really optimize our risk, if we can control what we can modify, then we’re all in a better position.”
Details about the study
In the study, which was also presented Friday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Amsterdam, 529 people were randomly assigned to receive either a placebo or to ramp up to a 2.4 mg weekly shot of semaglutide, the dose typically used for weight loss.
Both groups were encouraged to exercise and eat a healthy diet.
The group taking the drug lost about 13% of their body weight over a year, while those receiving the placebo lost about 3%.
On a measure of symptoms and physical limitations of their heart condition, those on the drug saw a 17% improvement, while those on the placebo saw just 9%, the study found.
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