Hi and welcome to another edition of Your Health with Dr. Christy. My name is Dr. Christy Risinger and today I've got some great news about Semaglutide or Wegovy, which is also known as Ozempic.
So Novo Nordisk did an incredible study over the last couple of years. They actually started it in 2018 and recruited over 17,000 patients that were aged 45 and older. So they split them into two groups and these patients needed to have some evidence of cardiovascular disease upon inclusion in the study, but they could not have diabetes and they needed to be either overweight or obese. So a BMI of at least of 27 or higher. So they gave half the patients Semaglutide and titrated it up probably every month up to the maximum dose of 2.4 milligrams versus patients that just received a placebo.
And they just waited and they watched and they found that at the end of their study there was a 20% reduction in cardiovascular disease such as fatal heart attacks, non-fatal heart attacks, and non-fatal strokes. So there was a 20% reduction in patients that were taking Semaglutide versus those that weren't.
This is incredible news and I'm really really hopeful as someone who's in the obesity medicine world now that this will continue to encourage insurers to cover this medication because really that's the most difficult thing that I'm running into now. I have patients that want to take this medication and I'm just not able to get it approved by insurance especially when it's just being used for weight loss. And you know the current weight loss medications that have been approved that are currently out there, none of them have this kind of cardiovascular risk data which makes this really exciting as well.
So I do need to caution and say that this information came from a press release from Nova Nordisk. So I wasn't able to look at the granular data like I want to know more about the patient characteristics. Were a majority of them over the age of 80 or were most of them like 50 to 60? And what kind of cardiovascular disease did they have upon enrollment into the study? But overall these results look amazing and Nova Nordisk says it'll give this published data at a conference sometime in 2023, so we'll have to wait for that. But once again exciting news for this class of medications called GLP-1 agonists, Semaglutide, also known as Wegovy.
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