STRIKING NEW RESEARCH findings from the Yale School of Medicine presented last week at the European Society of Cardiology Conference in London, show that drugs containing semaglutide, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, have more far-reaching health benefits than first thought and that they can slow down the biological ageing process, allowing people to live in better health for longer.
We already know that drugs like semaglutide improve outcomes for people with diabetes and reduce the risk of death in people who are obese or overweight and have cardiovascular disease.
These new findings, from a three-year trial involving almost 18,000 people over the age of 45 who were overweight or obese, tell us that the people who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes. It improved heart failure symptoms in some participants and cut levels of inflammation in the body, even among people who did not lose weight while taking the drug.
This suggests that the drug has a range of other health benefits, giving great hope for improved outcomes and quality of life for lots of people.
The early days of any new drug or treatment have seldom led to as much conversation as we have seen following the launch of Ozempic and Wegovy, and their use among some people as a treatment for obesity. With so much noise, it is understandable that people are confused about the benefits and side effects associated with the drug.
Ozempic and similar semaglutide drugs work by mimicking a hormone, GLP-1, to trick the body into feeling full. The appetite is suppressed and this leads to weight loss. The drugs also stimulate insulin production, which helps manage type 2 diabetes.
They are invariably dispensed in a once-a-week injection to the body, dispensed by the patient themselves. Thousands of patients are prescribed Ozempic in Ireland and covered under the HSE drugs payment scheme, but for the treatment of diabetes only so far. However, thousands more are taking the drug for weight loss purposes.
I’ve seen patients get on very well with the drug and others who don’t tolerate it quite so well, and there is some evidence that some people who take it experience rebound weight gain down the line. That is all very well documented at this stage, but these latest findings from the Yale-based trial helpfully shed new and exciting light on the unexpected health benefits of the drug in a way that should inform the conversation.
The researchers have shown that the drug reduces rates of death, not just from heart and vascular disease – which we expected – but also from other causes, including deaths from infections.
One very notable finding was that the drug reduced the number of participants who died from Covid-19. In a fortuitous turn of circumstances scientifically, the spike in death rates caused by the pandemic which occurred in the middle of the trial, allowed this signal of death reduction to be detected.
Obesity is a global challenge, and Ireland is disproportionately affected compared to other European countries. That is obvious to me as someone who practised medicine in Germany for 13 years and then returned to Ireland.
These findings highlight the reality that left untreated, obesity is a major killer, not just in terms of heart disease but also in terms of other diseases like infections and cancer. Without concerted efforts, obesity will erode the gains in life expectancy that have been made over the last 50 years, as has already been seen in certain countries like the US.
That is why I am glad to be able to have a hopeful conversation about the benefits of this drug as a new treatment option for patients who are overweight or obese and have heart disease.
Professor Robert Byrne is Chair of Cardiovascular Research at the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Director of Cardiology at the Mater Private Network, Dublin.
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