Wegovy helps reduce heart failure symptoms in obese people: Study

Wegovy, the favored weight reduction drug from Novo Nordisk, significantly reduced symptoms of a typical style of heart failure in patients with obesity, based on a late-stage clinical trial released Friday. 

Wegovy helped alleviate symptoms like shortness of breath, fatigue, swelling within the legs and irregular heart beat. It also resulted in lower blood pressure and reductions in inflammation – two essential markers of heart health. 

The outcomes add to Wegovy’s growing list of potential health advantages beyond shedding unwanted kilos. That might potentially result in expanded use of the drug and increased coverage by insurers. The outcomes also complement the groundbreaking trial data Novo Nordisk released earlier this month, which found that Wegovy slashed the chance of significant heart-related problems by 20%. 

“We look ahead to working closely with the clinical community and regulators to assist realise this potential over the approaching months,” Martin Lange, Novo Nordisk’s head of development, said in a release. He was referring to the center health advantages observed in each trials. 

The brand new study on 529 obese patients focused on a heart condition often called preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF – a condition that comprises roughly half of all heart failure cases and occurs when the center’s lower chamber pumps less blood than the body needs.

An estimated 2.5 million people within the U.S. have that condition and greater than 80% of those patients even have obesity. 

The study, published within the Recent England Journal of Medicine, found that Wegovy led to an almost 17-point improvement on a 100-point scale that is used to evaluate symptoms of HFpEF. 

By comparison, patients who received a placebo had a nine-point improvement.

Wegovy also led to improvements in physical limitations: Patients who took the drug were capable of walk further in six minutes than those within the placebo group. 

Those on Wegovy also lost about 13% of their body weight, compared with 2.6% for those on placebo, over the course of the year-long trial.

There have been fewer serious safety events in patients who took Wegovy in comparison with those that took the placebo. But more patients stopped taking Wegovy due to gastrointestinal issues, that are commonly observed with other weight reduction drugs. 

One limitation of the trial was its lack of diversity: 96% of the participants were white.

Wegovy and Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic sparked a weight reduction industry gold rush last 12 months for helping patients lose unwanted weight. They’re a part of a category of medication called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic a hormone produced within the gut to suppress an individual’s appetite. 

But Novo Nordisk is grappling with supply constraints which have led to shortages of each drugs. 

There are also recent reports of patients who had suicidal and self-harm thoughts after taking Wegovy and other weight reduction drugs, which raised questions on the unintended and potentially life-threatening negative effects of the treatments