New research has found weight loss drug Wegovy can produce significant results for at least four years of treatment. The drug has also been found to deliver cardiovascular benefits in overweight and obese patients irrespective of the weight lost.
Wegovy is an injectable prescription drug that was approved by the FDA in 2021 for chronic weight loss management. The drug is based on a naturally occurring human hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), which plays an important role in regulating appetite and blood sugar levels. Its active ingredient is a molecule called semaglutide, which mimics the structure of this GLP-1 hormone and activates its receptors.
By activating these GLP-1 receptors, semaglutide induces feelings of fullness while delaying the emptying of our stomach, making us less hungry and therefore less likely to overeat.
Semaglutide can also help regulate blood sugar levels and is the main ingredient in Wegovy's sister drug, Ozempic, designed to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes.
The weight loss benefits of Wegovy have long been understood, but exactly how long these effects last has been more of a mystery.
In a new paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine, a global team of researchers analyzed the impacts of semaglutide over four years of use. These studies were funded by Wegovy and Ozempic's manufacturer, Novo Nordisk.
"This is an important study because it adds further evidence to the discussion on the decision to limit prescription to 2 years [...] because of questionable long term cost effectiveness," Simon Cork, Senior Lecturer in Physiology at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek. "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. It was assumed that weight plateau would continue but hasn't been shown until now."
The new paper is part of a long-term investigation into the health effects of semaglutide known as the SELECT trial, investigating the cardiovascular and weight loss impacts of the drug in over 17,600 adults over an average 40-month period. The participants were overweight or obese with a history of cardiovascular disease but not diabetes and were given either Semaglutide or placebo for the study period.
On average, patients on Semaglutide lost 10 percent of their body weight and roughly three inches around their waistline during the roughly four-year period. This was compared to a weight loss of 1.5 percent and 0.5 inches around the waist in the placebo group.
"Our long-term analysis of semaglutide establishes that clinically relevant weight loss can be sustained for up to 4 years in a geographically and racially diverse population of adults with overweight and obesity but not diabetes," Donna Ryan, a professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in New Orleans who led the study, said in a statement.
"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."
In a second study, also published in Nature Medicine, researchers lead by John Deanfield at University College London used the same dataset to examine the relationship between weight changes and cardiovascular outcomes. They found that Semglutide treatment delivered cardiovascular benefits irrespective of the participants' starting weight and weight loss.
"These findings have important clinical implications," Deanfield said in a statement. "Around half of the patients that I see in my cardiovascular practice have levels of weight equivalent to those in the SELECT trial and are likely to derive benefit from taking Semaglutide on top of their usual level of guideline-directed care.
"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."
It is important to note that not everyone likes semaglutide, with nausea and gut problems being the most commonly reported side effects.
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