People on weight loss drugs — such as Ozempic and Wegovy — have a significantly lower chance of dying or suffering harsh effects from coronavirus, studies that the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) published found.
Subjects who were already on a 2.4 milligram (mg) dose of semaglutide, the active ingredient in drugs that help the pancreas release the right amount of insulin when blood sugar levels are high and may decrease one’s appetite, had “consistently lower rates” of dying of any cause over the trial period, researchers found.
The research was led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and financially backed by Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, according to the Harvard Gazette.
Over the mean trial duration of 3.3 years, 17,604 cardiovascular disease patients 45 years old or older with a BMI (body mass index) of 27 kg/m^2 or more — overweight — were observed by the researchers taking either semaglutide or a placebo.
Although the study started before the coronavirus pandemic, researchers said that “the most severe periods [of the outbreak] were concurrent with the ongoing trial, thus providing the opportunity to evaluate the effect of COVID-19 on patients who were at high risk of COVID-19-related complications and death given their underlying comorbidities.”
The results showed that semaglutide did not reduce the risk of being infected with the virus, but fewer participants who were on semaglutide had coronavirus-related “serious adverse events” or died of the virus compared to those who only took the placebo.
According to the researchers, 232 people on the weight loss drug experienced serious adverse events compared to 277 of those who were not on it, and 43 died compared to 65 who were not on it.
Overall, patients on semaglutide had a 33 percent lower chance of dying from the sickness.
“The trial started before COVID-19, and we never anticipated a global respiratory pandemic,” one of the studies’ co-authors, Benjamin M. Scirica, told the Gazette.
As the director of quality initiatives at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Cardiovascular Division and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Scirica specializes in that area of research.
“It is rare for a cardio-metabolic drug to modify non-cardiovascular outcomes,” he explained. “The fact that semaglutide reduced non-cardiovascular death and, in particular, COVID-19-related deaths, was surprising. It opens up new avenues for exploring how this class of drugs may benefit patients.”
The study also concluded that the trial subjects taking the drug had “lower rates of all-cause death, driven similarly by [cardiovascular disease] and non-[cardiovascular disease] death.”
The lower rate of non-cardiovascular disease deaths among patients on semaglutide “was predominantly because of fewer infectious deaths,” researchers said.
“These findings highlight the effect of semaglutide on mortality across a broad population of patients with [cardiovascular] disease and obesity.”
The other two studies on semaglutide that the JACC also published on Friday showed that the drug improves symptoms in patients with heart failure, inflammation, and other ailments, as well as reduces deaths in people with chronic kidney disease.
