CNN
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The popular weight loss drug Wegovy seems to provide more health benefits for people who have diabetes and a common kind of heart failure than just helping take off the pounds, according to a new study.
The study, published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed how the drug helped people with Type 2 diabetes who also had one of the most common kind of heart failure, obesity-related heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. This condition happens when the heart pumps regularly but is too stiff to fill properly.
Current treatment for this condition involves lifestyle changes and heart medications, but there are no therapies specifically approved to treat this particular condition, and the number of people who have it has been growing significantly, the study authors said.
Obesity-related heart failure with preserved ejection fraction can severely limit a person’s ability to participate in the activities of daily life. They often become tired easily and they have trouble breathing, and the condition can carry a high risk of hospitalization, disability and death.
Often, people with type 2 diabetes who have this kind of heart failure have a more severe form than those who don’t have diabetes.
The researchers who conducted this study – which was funded by the drug’s maker, Novo Nordisk – also published one last fall that found that Wegovy had significant positive health effects for people without diabetes who had this heart condition. But because people with diabetes may respond differently to medication, they wanted to learn whether they might see similar results in this additional group.
People with a more severe form of heart failure sometimes don’t respond as well to medication as those with less severe disease. Weight loss studies have also found that people with diabetes who took Wegovy tended to lose weight, but it wasn’t as much as those who did not have diabetes.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved two injectable semaglutide medications, which mimic the body’s GLP-1 hormone to help with insulin production and signal the brain to reduce appetite. Ozempic was approved in 2017 for type 2 diabetes, and Wegovy was approved in 2021 for obesity. In March, the FDA also approved Wegovy to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke in adults with cardiovascular disease and either obesity or overweight.
The new research seemed to offer further proof that Wegovy’s benefits extend to people with diabetes.
For this study, the researchers randomly assigned 616 people who had type 2 diabetes and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction into two groups. The participants came from 108 sites in 16 countries and Asia, Europe and North and South America, and all had a body-mass index of 30 or more. One group got Wegovy, and the other group got a placebo.
The participants who got Wegovy started at a lower dose and built up to a 2.4 milligram dose once a week. Researchers followed both groups for a year.
The people who got Wegovy had much better outcomes, with more weight loss and a bigger reduction in heart failure-related symptoms and physical limitations compared with those who got the placebo.
They also could walk farther over the course of six minutes and had improvements in biomarkers for…
Read More: Weight-loss drug Wegovy offers benefits for people with diabetes and common form