United States: A recent study revealed benefits associated with the active ingredient in Ozempic, which were so impressive that arthritis patients did not need treatment by the time the study was over.
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The new research was published in the journal Nature and the New York Times; in the two publications, experts wrote about the new semaglutide study that brought significant positive changes to knee osteoarthritis trials in eleven countries.
Dr. Bob Carter, who is the deputy director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and not involved in the new trial that was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, said that the reductions in knee pain among the overweight arthritic trial patients were phenomenal.
According to Carter, “The magnitude of the improvement is of a scope we haven’t seen before with a drug,” and “They had an almost 50 percent reduction in their knee pain. That’s huge.”
What more are the experts stating?
Bliddal, the Danish rheumatologist and director of the trials, said many patients at the trial endpoint demonstrated sufficient improvement in knee arthritis to be out of the trial.
According to Bliddal, who works at the Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark’s capital, “They got a therapy that was so effective that they more or less were treated out of the study,” futurism.com reported.
Since weight loss can alleviate knee arthritis by taking some pressure off that part, the new data are especially encouraging, in part because exercising sore knees is challenging.
But crucially, and where the interest lies, the study, sponsored by Ozempic and Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk, involved 400 patients in five continents who were given weekly injections of either a placebo or semaglutide.
All of those patients, nature says, were regarded as obese, with an average of seventy-one score on a one to hundred pain scale, through which it pained to walk for them.
Not surprisingly, those patients on the active compound of semaglutide shed three and a half times more weight than those on placebo — but it is shocking that, on average, their pain scores went down by 42 compared with the placebo group’s reduction of 28.
They also felt more easiness in mobility, like climbing stairs, to be done on a daily basis, futurism.com reported.
The experts mentioned that several of those improvements were caused by removing weight from the affected knees, and they also noted that the well-known anti-inflammatory effect of semaglutide has also played an important role.