The danger of type 2 diabetes (T2D) is greater than halved by weekly injections of latest obesity drug semaglutide, in line with latest research being presented on the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Stockholm, Sweden (19-23 Sept).

Semaglutide was recently approved within the US as an obesity treatment and has been provisionally approved to treat obesity in England.

Semaglutide appears to be probably the most effective medication to this point for treating obesity and is starting to shut the gap with the quantity of weight reduction following bariatric surgery.”

Dr W. Timothy Garvey, Department of Nutrition Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham

“Its approval was based on clinical trial results showing that it reduces weight by over 15% on average, when used along with a healthy lifestyle programme.

“This amount of weight reduction is sufficient to treat or prevent a broad array of obesity complications that impair health and quality of life and is a game changer in obesity medicine.”

Obesity is thought to extend the chance of T2D a minimum of six-fold and Dr Garvey and colleagues were all in favour of whether semaglutide could reduce this risk.

To learn more, they carried out a latest evaluation of the info from two trials of semaglutide.

In STEP1, participants (1,961) with chubby or obesity received an injection of two.4mg of semaglutide or a placebo weekly, for 68 weeks.

STEP4 involved 803 participants with chubby or obesity. All received weekly injections of two.4mg semaglutide for 20 weeks. They then either remained on semaglutide or were switched to placebo for the subsequent 48 weeks.

Participants in each trials received advice on weight loss program and exercise.

The researchers used Cardiometabolic Disease Staging (CMDS) to predict the participants’ risk of developing T2D in the subsequent 10 years.

CDMS has been previously shown be a highly accurate measure of T2D risk and is calculated using a formula which aspects in a patient’s sex, age, race, BMI and blood pressure, in addition to blood glucose, HDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

Within the STEP1 participants receiving semaglutide, 10-year risk scores for T2D decreased by 61% (from 18.2% at week 0 to 7.1% at week 68).

This compares to a 13% reduction in risk rating for those given the placebo (17.8% at week 0 to fifteen.6% at week 68).

Risk scores mirrored weight reduction, which was 17%, on average, with semaglutide vs 3% with placebo.

Firstly of the trial, risk scores were higher within the participants with pre-diabetes than in those with normal blood sugar levels. Nonetheless, semaglutide reduced the chance by the same amount in each groups.

Within the STEP 4 participants, the biggest decreases in risk scores were seen in the primary 20 weeks (from 20.6% at week 0 to 11.4% at week 20). In those that continued receiving semaglutide, the chance rating decreased further to 7.7% but, in those that were switched to placebo, it rose to fifteen.4%.

This means that sustained treatment with semaglutide is required to keep up the reduction in T2D risk

Dr Garvey says: “Semaglutide reduces the longer term risk of diabetes by over 60% in patients with obesity – this figure is analogous whether a patient has prediabetes or normal blood sugar levels.

“Sustained treated is required to keep up the profit.

“Given the rising rates of obesity and diabetes, semaglutide may very well be used effectively to cut back the burden of those chronic diseases.”