Daily Dose: Semaglutide 2.4 mg and Long-term Weight Loss

Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On January 24, 2023, we reported on a study published in Obesity that evaluated the effect of once-weekly semaglutide 2.4 mg on 2-year control of eating.

The study

Researchers tapped 2 years of treatment data with semaglutide 2.4 mg from the pivotal phase 3 STEP 5 clinical trial. STEP 5 compared semaglutide with placebo for long-term treatment of obesity or overweight in persons with at least 1 weight-related comorbidity and without diabetes. A total of 304 participants were enrolled and randomized to receive active drug or placebo and all received the same lifestyle intervention. For the current study, investigators evaluated STEP 5 data from a 19-item version of the Control of Eating Questionnaire (CoEQ) administered to a subgroup of trial participants at weeks 0, 20, 52, and 104.

Improvements in craving domain scores were positively correlated with reductions in body weight from baseline to week 104 in participants treated with semaglutide 2.4 mg. Scores for desire to eat salty and spicy food, cravings for dairy and starchy foods, difficulty in resisting cravings, and control of eating were significantly reduced with semaglutide versus placebo (P for all<.05).

Clinical implications

"The availability of semaglutide 2.4 mg represents an effective longer-term treatment for overweight or obesity by improving the control of eating and food cravings, which enables patients to achieve and maintain substantial weight loss."

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