Two analyses of the SELECT trial, published a day apart, reach the same uncomfortable conclusion from different directions. The first, in the European Heart Journal, tried to work out how much of semaglutide’s 20% reduction in heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths runs through weight loss and the other risk factors it improves, and could … Read more
Novo Nordisk announced this morning that CagriSema, its investigational combination of semaglutide and a second hormone, beat tirzepatide on weight loss in a head-to-head phase 3 trial in adults with type 2 diabetes: an estimated 12.4% against 9.1% at week 60. A second phase 3 trial put CagriSema at 21.0% weight loss against 2.0% on … Read more
A 225-person tirzepatide trial in Japan has reported its metabolic detail, and one finding is unusually practical: across the treatment groups, the change in waist measurement tracked the change in visceral fat — the fat wrapped around the internal organs, and the kind that carries the metabolic risk — with a correlation of 0.84. Visceral … Read more
Semaglutide’s highest-dose weight-loss trial put a small group of its participants inside an MRI scanner, and the results speak to the question that trails every GLP-1 drug: what happens to muscle. Among 55 people drawn from the 1,407-person STEP UP trial, fat volume fell sharply over 72 weeks, thigh muscle volume fell by an amount … Read more
A combination of semaglutide and a second injected hormone analogue produced about 6.6 percentage points more weight loss than semaglutide on its own, according to a meta-analysis of eight randomised trials in 6,898 people published on 15 September. The combination, CagriSema, is not something a reader in the United States can fill a prescription for: … Read more
A five-day fast produced a fall in body mass index that was still partly present twelve weeks later, and the mix of bacteria in a person’s gut beforehand helped predict how much of it they kept, according to a randomised trial published on 16 September in Genome Medicine. The study involved 38 healthy adults under … Read more
A dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist made by a Chinese biotech produced up to 18.3% weight loss over 24 weeks in a placebo-controlled phase 2 trial, according to results published on 17 September in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. The drug, BGM0504, acts on the same two gut-hormone receptors as tirzepatide. The trial was small, at 120 … Read more
One of the open questions about GLP-1 drugs is whether they are a good idea in people who are already frail — older, carrying several conditions, less able to absorb a period of appetite loss. A new analysis of the SELECT trial, published in JAMA Cardiology on 16 September 2026, sorted all 17,604 participants by … Read more