PHILADELPHIA — At the recent American Heart Association meeting, a cavernous room full of doctors erupted into applause. Cleveland Clinic cardiologist A. Michael Lincoff had just presented the dramatic — and at times enigmatic — results of a new clinical trial on the weight loss drug semaglutide.
Lincoff’s work notches yet another role for semaglutide, which doctors currently use to treat diabetes and obesity. Previous work had already uncovered a cardiovascular benefit in people with type 2 diabetes. The new study, which targeted overweight or obese patients with cardiovascular disease, is the first to show that semaglutide can help the hearts of people without diabetes too.
That’s important because it expands the number of people who could benefit from the drug, says Tiffany Powell-Wiley, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. In the United States alone, more than 6 million obese or overweight people have cardiovascular disease but not diabetes. Semaglutide could be a game changer for these people, says Powell-Wiley, who was not part of the new trial. Still, she and others at the meeting recognized the limitations of the study — and the limitations of the drug.
As much as we may want a quick fix for the rising levels of obesity seen around the world, Powell-Wiley says, “it’s important to understand that this isn’t the panacea.” We still don’t know how well semaglutide works in a diverse group of people, she says. And the drug doesn’t fix the societal, environmental and social factors that lead to obesity — and its potential health consequences — in the first place.
2023-11-15 15:30:47
Source from www.sciencenews.org
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