Semaglutide Shows Potential for Significant CVD Prevention: Daily Dose

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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.

Last week, we reported on findings from a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that examined the eligibility for and preventive potential of semaglutide in patients with overweight or obesity and myocardial infarction (MI).

The study

Researchers aimed to provide estimates of the prevalence of patients meeting SELECT eligibility criteria, 5-year major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE) incidence, and the corresponding number needed to treat (NNT) to reduce 1 MACE in patients with first-time MI. They conducted the contemporary observational cohort study using real-world data from Danish health registries.

The research team culled data from the Western Denmark Heart Registry for 34 405 participants aged 45 years and older with a first-time MI and coronary artery disease from 2010 to 2021 and then applied SELECT trial inclusion criteria to the cohort: age as indicated, without diabetes and with a body mass index (BMI) of 27 kg/m2 or higher. Of the original cohort, 31% were “SELECT-eligible to treatment with semaglutide,” the authors wrote.

The findings

During the median 5-year follow-up, researchers observed 972 MACE events among the SELECT-eligible patients and 544 recurrent MIs, 174 ischemic strokes and 338 CV deaths. The 5-year MACE incidence was 10.7% (95% CI, 10-11.3) among the SELECT-eligible patients. The estimated NNT to prevent one MACE event was 49 patients (95% CI, 35-98).

Authors' comment

“These results are of paramount importance to regulatory authorities and clinicians when implementing semaglutide in clinical practice."

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