Medications originally designed to treat obesity and diabetes may also dramatically cut the risk of serious heart problems.
A new study led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has shown that drugs such as semaglutide and tirzepatide can reduce the chances of being hospitalized for heart failure or dying from it by more than 40 percent.
The findings, published in JAMA, could mark a turning point in how doctors treat certain forms of heart failure.
Semaglutide, sold under brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro, are best known as powerful weight loss injections.
In recent years, they have become widely used around the world.
But their potential to improve health goes far beyond helping people lose weight. Scientists have been investigating whether these drugs can also lower the risk of heart-related conditions.
The TUM study focused on a type of heart failure called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF.
In this condition, the heart still pumps blood well enough, but the stiffened muscle does not fill properly, leaving patients short of breath, fatigued, and at high risk of hospitalization.
More than 30 million people worldwide live with HFpEF, and there are only a few effective treatment options available.
Professor Heribert Schunkert, Director of the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases at the TUM University Hospital German Heart Center, says the new research provides strong evidence. “In patients with HFpEF, both drugs showed a clear protective effect.
Our analysis of around 100,000 patients offers a robust basis for expanding the approval of these medications for heart failure,” he explained.
The team, working with colleagues from Harvard Medical School, analyzed data from three large U.S. health insurance databases.
Unlike traditional clinical trials, which are limited to a few thousand participants, this database study included patient populations nearly 20 times larger. That made it possible to examine real-world outcomes and to study groups that are often excluded from clinical trials.
The results confirmed what earlier trials in people with diabetes or obesity had suggested: patients treated with semaglutide or tirzepatide had far fewer hospitalizations for heart failure and lower death rates compared with patients taking another diabetes drug that had shown no benefit in heart failure.
Dr. Nils Krüger, lead author of the study, said the findings could have a major impact. “In Germany, heart failure is the leading cause of hospital admissions and a huge burden on the health care system. Our study shows that these medications are highly effective and could prevent many of those admissions,” he said.
Looking ahead, the researchers believe data-driven studies like this will become increasingly important.
Germany’s new Health Data Utilization Act will make anonymized health insurance data more available for research, while protecting privacy. Professor Schunkert says this approach will help ensure that scientific discoveries can be translated into better patient care more quickly.
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