Wegovy, a drug similar to Ozempic, shocked researchers with an unexpected finding after a several-year-long study: The drug dropped death rates in those infected with COVID-19 and decreased deaths from any cause.
The drug is prescribed to those with obesity to aid in weight loss and aims to reduce the risk of cardiovascular events. Drugs like it, semaglutides, have grown increasingly popular.
“All the hype around various pharmaceutical drugs that we hear is exactly that — hype,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the New York Times. “But these drugs are repeatedly and routinely demonstrating that they are game changers.”
Faust called the study’s results “stunning” and wrote an editorial to accompany the original study. To have a drug reduce all-cause mortality is rare in clinical treatments, but Wegovy reduced COVID-19 deaths by 33% along with reducing all-cause mortality by 19%.
It’s unusual that a drug aimed to treat obesity and cardiovascular problems would reduce all-cause mortality, Benjamin Scirica, a cardiologist and senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the outlet.
“Most of our studies in the cardiovascular world — with statins or other cardiovascular drugs — have a pretty good effect on cardiovascular deaths but don’t affect non-cardiovascular deaths,” he said.
The study had 17,604 participants with an average body mass index of 27 or higher and heart disease. It followed participants over a more than three-year period. Of the 4,258 infected with COVID-19, 184 died, and of the 184, 78 took the drug, with 106 taking a placebo.
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While losing weight is a common cause for reducing all-cause mortality, Faust says it has to be more than that. He thinks the drug is improving all-around health, and reduces chronic inflammation. If so, the drug could offer direct protection from death, especially from infectious diseases.
Scirica will go back to other studies to check if semaglutides affected those with infectious diseases in an effort to see if the drug directly helps them as well. He said researchers should search for such data in other new studies.