Weight-loss drugs ‘slow down the ageing process’, scientists suggest

Weight-loss drugs are poised to revolutionise healthcare by slowing down the ageing process and by allowing people to live for longer and in better health. That is the dramatic message from leading scientists after studies were presented last week at the European Society of Cardiology Conference in London.

Research has already found that semaglutide – also known by the brand names Wegovy and Ozempic – reduced the risk of death in people who were obese or overweight and had cardiovascular disease.

But fresh studies have found that Ozempic has impacts beyond what was originally imagined for the drug. People who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes, not just from cardiovascular causes, researchers discovered.

“Semaglutide has far-reaching benefits beyond what we initially imagined,” said Prof Harlan Krumholz of the Yale school of medicine. “It’s not just avoiding heart attacks. These are health promoters. It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process.”

The studies were produced from the Select trial in the US, which studied 17,604 people aged 45 or older who were overweight or obese and had established cardiovascular disease but not diabetes. They received semaglutide or a placebo and were tracked for more than three years.

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A total of 833 participants died during the study, of which 58% were related to cardiovascular causes and 42% from others, with infections being the most common cause of death in this latter group. Crucially, those who took semaglutide were less likely to die of infections than those in the placebo group while it also consistently reduced the risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes, it was found.

“The robust reduction in non-cardiovascular death, and particularly infections deaths, was surprising,” said Benjamin Scirica, a Harvard professor and the lead author of one of the studies. “These findings reinforce that overweight and obesity increases the risk of death due to many etiologies which can be modified with therapies like semaglutide.”