Higher dose of this diabetes med could improve blood sugar and weight loss

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Diabetes means having too much sugar in the blood.

Over time, this can get worse. This makes it harder for people to keep their sugar levels normal. Some medicines can help, and one of them is called semaglutide.

Big Study with Big News

A famous doctor, John Buse, and other researchers did a big study. They wanted to see how different amounts of semaglutide can help. They published their findings in The Lancet.

They found that taking 25 mg or 50 mg of this medicine every day helped more than taking only 14 mg. People’s sugar levels were better, and they also lost more weight.

Dr. Buse said that small doses of the medicine are very good at lowering sugar. But the bigger doses are better for losing weight. For example, with 50 mg, people lost around 17.5 pounds. This is much more than with the small dose.

How the Study Worked

1,606 people joined this study. Most of them were men around 58 years old. They were split into three groups. Each group took a different amount of the medicine: 14 mg, 25 mg, or 50 mg, for a whole year.

To know if a person’s sugar is good, doctors look at a number called A1C. Healthy adults should have an A1C below 7%. In the study, everyone started with an A1C between 8.0% and 10.5%.

At the end, the people taking 25 mg or 50 mg were more likely to get their A1C below 7%. This means their sugar was much better.

Weight Loss and Side Effects

This medicine also makes people eat less, so they lose weight. After a year, the group taking 50 mg lost about 17.5 pounds on average.

The group taking 25 mg lost around 14.8 pounds. The group with 14 mg lost about 10 pounds.

But like all medicines, there can be side effects. The most common one was feeling sick in the stomach. Some people also felt like throwing up, especially if they took the bigger doses. Some had diarrhea or constipation.

In Short

Semaglutide can help people with diabetes control their sugar and lose weight. Bigger doses like 25 mg and 50 mg seem to work better than smaller doses. But people might also have some stomach problems with the bigger doses.

If you care about diabetes, please read studies about the sleep problem linked to vision loss in people with diabetes, and this drug may prevent kidney failure in people with diabetes.

For more information about health, please see recent studies that blueberries strongly benefit people with metabolic syndrome, and results showing Vitamin D may reduce dangerous complications in type 2 diabetes.

The study was published in The Lancet.

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