University of Minnesota researcher leads study showing nearly half of adolescents on semaglutide reached healthy weight
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (07/05/2023) — Published in the peer-reviewed journal Obesity, a University of Minnesota Medical School researcher led a study showing that 45% of teenagers who took once-weekly semaglutide as part of the STEP TEENS trial managed to lose enough weight to drop below the clinical cutoff for obesity.
The study—led by Dr. Aaron Kelly, co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the U of M Medical School—additionally found almost 74% of the adolescents who took semaglutide moved down by at least one weight category. Semaglutide at a lower dose is used to treat type 2 diabetes.
“These results underscore the high degree of clinical effectiveness of semaglutide in adolescents with obesity,” Kelly said. “In a practical sense, we see that semaglutide reduced weight below what is defined as clinical obesity in nearly 50% of the teens in our trial, which is historically unprecedented with treatments other than bariatric surgery.”
The STEP TEENS trial demonstrated semaglutide was associated with clinically meaningful improvements in body mass index categories compared with placebo across all baseline BMI classes in adolescents with obesity. The researchers also looked at how semaglutide affected BMI improvements in 12- to 17-year-old participants with a high BMI — specifically in the top 5%. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups: one group received a once-weekly injection of semaglutide and the other group received a placebo. Both groups also received similar lifestyle counseling. Researchers assessed the proportion of participants who showed improvement in their BMI category over 17 months and consistently followed the treatment.
They found 45% of the participants who received semaglutide had their BMI reduced below the clinical cutoff point for obesity, meaning they moved to the normal weight or overweight category. In comparison, only 12% of the participants in the placebo group achieved the same outcome.
“In the future, we hope to pursue studies with larger sample sizes and greater diversity, as well as evaluate long-term durability of weight reduction with ongoing treatment,” said Kelly. The study was funded by Novo Nordisk.
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