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A new study has found that one of the top names in the groundbreaking new class of weight loss drugs may not only be good at treating diabetes, but may even help prevent the disease.
From a new study published in the Medical Journal of New EnglandResearchers found that tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro diabetes treatment and Zepbound weight loss injection, reduces the risk of developing diabetes by as much as 94 percent in people at high risk for the disease.
Funded by Lilly as part of a Phase 3 trial of the efficacy of its flagship glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist – which, like Novo Nordisk’s chemically similar semaglutide, is the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, imitates the body’s own properties. feeling of fullness – this more than three-year study involved more than 2,500 subjects who were overweight and considered pre-diabetic.
In a randomized and double-blind experiment, researchers from an international consortium of medical schools had patients take weekly injections of a placebo injection or an injection of 5, 10 or 15 milligrams of tirzepatide.
As they discovered at the end of the 176-week trial, those taking tirzepatide not only lost a significant amount of weight, but also seemed to be much less likely to develop diabetes. Of the total group taking tirzepatide, only 1.3 percent were diagnosed with diabetes at the end of the long-term trial, while 13.3 percent of the placebo group were diagnosed with it.
While some studies have suggested that people who lose weight on GLP-1 drugs are likely to regain it after stopping them (although the data is somewhat mixed on that point), this study found that the apparent protective benefits for developing of diabetes seemed to be too low. last. After 17 weeks, only 2.4 percent of those taking active tirzepatide were diagnosed with diabetes. New York Times notes that the drug helped pre-diabetic study participants and overweight subjects control their blood sugar levels.
The same NYT The article points out that other studies conducted with Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy suggest that the active ingredient in these drugs, semaglutide, may provide similar protective benefits.
Should these results come to fruition in future studies, this could be yet another health benefit these drugs provide – although sky-high prices and poor insurance coverage mean most people still can’t afford them.
More about GLP-1s: Semaglutide is so effective in treating arthritis that patients were ‘more or less treated outside the study’