Blockbuster anti-obesity drugs appear to help improve people’s heart health regardless of how much weight they lose while taking the medication, a new study has found.
Patients taking the drug in a clinical trial saw significantly fewer heart attacks and strokes – and these benefits were similar for people who were only marginally overweight and those who were the most obese. They also held up regardless of the amount of weight lost.
“These findings reframe what we think this medication is doing,” Dr John Deanfield, one of the study’s authors and a cardiology professor at University College London, said in a statement.
“It is labelled as a weight loss jab, but its benefits for the heart are not directly related to the amount of weight lost,” he added.
The study was published in The Lancet medical journalfollowing apreliminary analysis last year.
It was funded by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, which makes the popular weight loss drug semaglutide, sold as Ozempic for type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for obesity or weight-related health problems.
The drug belongs to a class of drugs known as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, which help people lose weight by mimicking a hormone that makes them feel full for longer.
The study included data from more than 17,600 people aged 45 and older who were overweight and had heart disease, but not diabetes. They were randomly assigned to either receive weekly injections of semaglutide or a placebo, or dummy treatment.
Patients who received the drug saw a 20 per cent reduction in heart attacks, strokes, and other major cardiac events, the study found.
There was a link between heart health and shrinking waistlines – a reduction in waist circumference – which accounted for about one-third of the heart health benefits after two years.
Deanfield said that it isn’t surprising given abdominal fat, or fat around the belly, is “more dangerous for our cardiovascular health than overall weight”.
But overall, the benefits were largely unrelated to how much weight people lost in the first 4.5 months of taking the drug.
“You don’t have to lose a lot of weight and you don’t need a high BMI [body mass index] to gain cardiovascular benefit,” Deanfield said.
Researchers said GLP-1 drugs may curb heart health risks by reducing inflammation, improving blood pressure control, lowering cholesterol and other levels of fat in the blood, and supporting the health of blood vessels.
Deanfield said the findings support efforts to broaden access to semaglutide, rather than restricting access to the drug for the most obese patients and for limited periods of time.
However, he also cautioned that “investigations of side effects become especially important given the broad range of people this medicine and others like it could help”.
Gastrointestinal distress such as nausea, diarrhoea, and vomiting are among the most common side effects.
