Good morning. If you hear brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy and think of suddenly gaunt A-listers posing on the red carpet, it is surely now time to think again. There has already been substantial evidence that as well as in their initial role as a diabetes treatment, semaglutides – the kind of drug in question – can have a real impact on obesity for people for whom nothing else works. Now a new study has found that they don’t just help those people lose weight – they have a major effect on their heart health, regardless of how much weight they lose.
Obesity affects more than a quarter of adults, and nearly as many children – and those numbers are only going up, which brings serious consequences for public health, especially among the most deprived. So this is hugely significant news, which study author Prof John Deanfield says heralds a class of drugs as powerful as statins, “that could equally transform many chronic diseases of ageing”.
