May 19, 2023 – Nearly half of teenagers given the weight-loss drug semaglutide (Wegovy) were capable of lose enough weight to fall below the clinical threshold for obesity, a recent study shows.
By comparison, only 12.1% of obese adolescents who got a placebo within the 68-week study had blood pressure fall below the limit.
Semaglutide belongs to a category of medicines often called GLP-1 since it mimics the motion of glucagon-like peptide 1, a hormone produced within the gut that makes people feel full.
The study, called STEP TEENS (Semaglutide Treatment Effect in People with Obesity), also shows that 74% of study participants lost at the least one category of their body mass index (BMI) after a weekly injection of the drug, compared with 19% of those on placebo.
“In practice, we see that semaglutide reduced weight to levels below the definition of clinical obesity in nearly 50% of the adolescents in our study, which is historically unprecedented for treatments other than bariatric surgery,” said Dr. Aaron Kelly, co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine on the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who presented the most recent data Thursday on the European Congress on Obesity in Dublin, Ireland.
When taking semaglutide, a youngster is about 23 times more prone to fall below the obesity threshold than when taking a placebo, he said.
This evaluation, published within the Journal obesity on Wednesday, follows the publication of the major results of the study last autumn in New England Journal of Medicinewhich showed Semaglutide helps Teenagers drop some pounds.
The drug was approved by the FDA in January for the treatment of obesity in people aged 12 years and older.
Grace Malley, PhD from the Child & Adolescent Obesity Service, Children's Health Ireland in Dublin, said adolescents' access to comprehensive healthcare was critical to the right management of obesity.
“Treatment requires a long-term, multidisciplinary approach to chronic care, and usually the biological mechanisms that cause obesity start again after treatment is stopped to build up [fatty] tissue,” she said. This means that “families must have access to long-term treatment including nutritional therapy, exercise, behavioral support and sleep therapy, in combination with pharmacotherapy and surgical interventions if necessary.”
“The results of the STEP TEENS trial represent a promising development for the treatment of adolescent obesity and related liver function-related complications,” said Malley.
Practice part of the plan
In this latest analysis of the STEP TEENS trial, the authors examined the effect of semaglutide on shifting 134 adolescents from one BMI category to another, including crossing the obesity threshold into the overweight or normal weight category; 66 teenagers received a placebo.
All participants also received nutritional counseling and a goal of 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity per day.
“After 68 weeks, not much has happened [in placebo participants]However, 12.1% of placebo participants fell below the obesity threshold and were classified as overweight or normal weight,” Kelly said.
But by way of people taking semaglutide, “overall, 45% of patients on semaglutide fell below the clinical BMI cutoff for obesity, so 19.5% fell into the overweight category and 25.4% reduced their BMI to the normal weight category,” he said.
Although this was not “statistically significant,” Kelly identified that “women tended to respond better to semaglutide, as did younger adolescents and middle-weight individuals, and there was a similar pattern across obesity classes.”