People without diabetes taking Wegovy (semaglutide) for weight loss were less likely to die of COVID-19 during the pandemic, a large new study found.
Although the anti-obesity drug didn’t protect people from getting COVID-19, those on Wegovy were 33 percent less likely to die of the illness than those who took the placebo.
“We were somewhat surprised,” says the lead author, Benjamin Scirica, MD, MPH, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of innovation in the cardiovascular division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The findings open up new avenues for exploring how this class of weight loss drugs may benefit people, says Dr. Scirica.
Wegovy Is Already Known to Reduce Risk of Death From Heart Disease
These new findings are from an analysis of the SELECT trial, which included more than 17,000 people and was originally designed to look at Wegovy’s impact on cardiovascular crises like stroke and heart attack in people age 45 or older who had obesity and heart disease but not diabetes.
That study found that people who took a 2.4 milligram (mg) dose of Wegovy over three years reduced the risk of heart attack, stroke, or death due to cardiovascular disease by 20 percent compared with people taking placebo.
The new analysis used the data to explore whether Wegovy reduced the risk of death from any cause, death caused by heart disease, and non-heart-disease-related death, including death from COVID.
During the 3.3 years of the study, there were 833 deaths; 58 percent were heart-related and the rest were not.
Key findings from the analysis included:
- Overall death rates in the group taking Wegovy were 19 percent lower than in the placebo group.
- Deaths from heart disease were 15 percent lower, and deaths from other reasons were 23 percent lower.
- About 24 percent of participants tested positive for COVID-19 during the study. Although people taking Wegovy didn’t have a lower rate of infection, they did have fewer serious COVID-19-related health issues (232 versus 277) and fewer COVID-19-related deaths (43 versus 65).
Wegovy May Help the Liver, Kidneys, and Immune System Work Better
The trial started about a year before the arrival of COVID-19, but when the pandemic hit, investigators quickly recognized there was important data to be collected, says Scirica.
The fact that semaglutide reduced non-cardiovascular death, and in particular COVID-19-related death, was unexpected, he says.
“Honestly, we do not completely understand the mechanism behind the reduced deaths. It may be due to weight loss, but more likely, semaglutide improves overall health with favorable effects on the kidney, liver, and perhaps the immune system, so that [participants] were more likely to survive COVID-19,” says Scirica.
“The findings on the reduced risk of cardiovascular deaths are a great confirmation of what’s been clear about the heart health benefits of weight loss,” says Dan Azagury, MD, a weight loss physician and bariatric surgeon at Stanford Medicine in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved in the study.
The reduction in mortality related to COVID-19 is more surprising, but Dr. Azagury believes those benefits are likely due to weight loss, given that obesity is a risk factor for poor COVID-19 outcomes.
“If you look at the data, the benefits in reducing COVID adverse events happen further down the line, months into the trial, once people started to lose weight. Fat cells have a lot of receptors for the COVID virus, and there is clearly a higher burden of infections with obesity, so I think the benefits seen here make sense,” he says.
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