Patients who took the diet drug Wegovy for a year had a reduced risk of heart disease, a promising finding that sent Novo Nordisk A/S shares to a record.
(Bloomberg) — Patients who took the diet drug Wegovy for a year had a reduced risk of heart disease, a promising finding that sent Novo Nordisk A/S shares to a record.
The stock rose as much as 3.1% in Copenhagen in response to study results presented over the weekend. Wegovy’s prodigious success has turned Novo into Europe’s second-most valuable firm behind the luxury group LVMH.
People followed in the Wegovy trial presented at the European Congress on Obesity saw their 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease decline by 18%, said Andres Acosta, an associate professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Researchers used a standardized survey of heart risk to assess about 100 people, mostly White women, who took Wegovy over the course of a year at clinic sites around the US.
The study took place in the real world rather than a clinical trial, meaning there was no control group, so researchers couldn’t say for sure whether the improvement was due to Wegovy, known generically as semaglutide, or whether other factors could have been at play. But the outcome is a positive sign as doctors await results from a larger, more rigorous trial being run by Novo, Acosta said in an interview.
The results are “a great sign that the Select trials that are ongoing for cardiovascular overall mortality hopefully will be successful,” Acosta said in an interview, using the name assigned to Novo’s study. “But we need to wait for those studies.”
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