The reduced risk of heart disease seen in people who are overweight or have obesity taking the weight loss drug semaglutide may not be due to a drop in weight alone. Results suggest that semaglutide should be considered as a cardiovascular disease reduction drug and not just as a weight loss drug.
https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/obesity-drug-heart-benefits-not-just-due-to-weight-loss
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The reduced risk of heart disease seen in people who are overweight or have obesity taking the weight loss drug semaglutide may not be due to a drop in weight alone, a study shows.
Researchers examined known risk factors for heart disease, such as body weight and waist circumference, in patients taking part in a clinical trial of semaglutide.
Although the risk of serious cardiovascular disease was lower for those taking the drug, only half of this reduction could be explained by changes in these risk factors.
The findings suggest that semaglutide may also be working to reduce heart disease in some other way, experts say.
*Whether we combine all risk factors together or look at some subsets of the risk factors, no more than half of the reduction in heart disease could be explained by the changes in these risk factors. These results suggest that semaglutide should be considered as a cardiovascular disease reduction drug and not just as a weight loss drug.*
*We don’t know how else semaglutide could be preventing heart disease, but many other mechanisms have been proposed. These include anti-inflammatory effects not fully captured by the risk factors measured in the trial, and other direct effects on heart muscle or on the lining of blood vessels.*
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehag524/8774585
Or for, you know, diabetes treatment…
Man, the positive only press on these drugs has me skeptical. It’s almost like they’re a bazillion dollar industry.
So should most of us be taking it basically?
Even more, researchers found that *only 33% of the cardiovascular* benefits provided by semaglutide can be attributed to reductions in waist circumference and weight loss.
Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes by baseline and changes in adiposity measurements: a prespecified analysis of the SELECT trial
[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01375-3/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01375-3/fulltext)
>Cardiovascular outcomes were similar among semaglutide-treated patients who did or did not lose at least 5% of their baseline bodyweight. In the 5·5% of patients in the semaglutide group who gained weight, semaglutide appeared to have less treatment effect on MACE, although the extent to which non-adherence to study drug contributed is unknown
??? Glp is already recommended beside sglt 2 inhibitor as a trratment for many heart dkseaae in many gudeline
Now people who feel they treated their heart disease “the right way” can be furious at GLP-1 users as well.
I’m joking but the amount of anger directed at people using these drugs is eye opening.
My cholesterol has dropped 70 points on it
Would this help someone who already has heart disease/failure or is it only a risk reduction?
Glps are treatment for fatty liver (which last I read, effects ⅓ of people), and are shown to actually reverse the disease.
While you would think the biggest risk of fatty liver is liver failure or liver cancer, its actually cardiovascular health. So, knowing that these two things (fatty liver and cardiovascular health) are very connected, it makes sense that reducing one will help the other.
It’s incredible that I read stories like this every single day, about how GLP-1s more than likely are helping people in 10000 different ways but my job looked at all of that said “nah, too expensive. Sorry bud”.
Hope you don’t go blind.
“It could. It might be. Perhaps. It should be considered…”
in like 5 years its gonna seem like a bad idea to NOT be on a small dose of this at minimum.
Eating less bad food causes a drop in weight and causes a lot of other health benefits. How do we know that the drug directly causes the additional improvement as opposed to through the appetite suppression mechanism?
Edit: the moralizing around this topic has no place in this sub. I wasn’t making a moral judgment on anyone for being on GLP1s, and I wasn’t saying they don’t need the medicine. I’m simply asking about the casual mechanism implied by an article that provides nothing but correlations. Your sensitivity is your own problem.
What about people who would benefit immensely from the numerous benefits these drugs confer but are already thin, non-diabetic and don’t meet the criteria necessary to have it prescribed? If they could get a prescription, would the inevitable weight loss that comes with it be safe for someone with a normal BMI?
I need this medicine so badly. I had a heart attack ten years ago, am obese, my cholesterol WILL NOT go down, I am having trouble losing weight of course due to physical limitations and societal pressure (my family wants me fat, no really). I know if I could lose like 10% of my body weight that I would regain so much mobility and be able to exercise more. Ugh I need health insurance.
Does it have anything to do with the fact that as people eat less in general, they also eat less unhealthy food / cholesterol / saturated fats etc that exacerbate these cardiovascular conditions?
Does glp1 help to have less gas