In a new analysis of Novo Nordisk’s vast SELECT study, researchers may have a better answer for one of the biggest questions surrounding GLP-1s — how long can the weight loss last?
Among trial participants, weight loss continued over 65 weeks (15 months) and was sustained for up to four years while on the drug, according to a paper published Monday in Nature. And at 208 weeks (nearly four years), semaglutide was associated with a mean reduction in weight of 10.2%.
The Danish pharma said last year that the SELECT study, which had over 17,000 participants, found that semaglutide reduced major adverse cardiovascular events by 20% in obese or overweight participants without diabetes. The FDA then approved it in March as an approach to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke in obese adults with heart disease, making it the first weight loss medication to also be approved to help prevent life-threatening cardiovascular events.
“We know that weight regain is very common in patients who stop taking semaglutide after this time, but we didn’t (until now) have any safety data or proof that weight would remain off,” Simon Cork, a senior lecturer in physiology at Anglia Ruskin University, wrote in a statement published on the UK’s Science Media Centre’s website. “It was assumed that weight plateau would continue but hasn’t been shown until now.”
From the UK’s perspective, the new analysis is “important” because it could go against the UK’s decision to limit semaglutide prescriptions to two years, Cork said. “That this data demonstrates improved cardiovascular and metabolic parameters continuing to 4 years may go some way to negating that argument,” he added. The two-year limit was imposed due to questions around long-term effectiveness.
The Nature paper also included two-year SELECT data. At 104 weeks, or about two years, 67.8% of participants on the drug had lost at least 5% of their body weight, compared to 21.3% of participants on placebo. Also, 44% of participants lost at least 10%, and nearly 5% lost at least 25% of their body weight.