For people living with type 2 diabetes and poor blood circulation in their legs, walking even short distances can feel painful and frustrating.
This condition is called peripheral artery disease, or PAD. It affects over 200 million people around the world, including about 12 million in the United States alone. PAD happens when fat and cholesterol clog the blood vessels in the legs.
This limits the flow of blood and oxygen, which can make your legs hurt when you walk or even when you rest. In more serious cases, it can lead to dangerous problems like wounds that don’t heal, the need to amputate a leg, or even death.
Until now, people with PAD haven’t had many good treatment options. There is one drug, cilostazol, that can help people walk farther, but it often causes side effects and isn’t safe for people with heart problems. That’s why doctors and patients have been looking for something better.
A new study called STRIDE has brought hope. This international study was the first to test whether a diabetes drug called semaglutide could also help people with PAD.
Semaglutide is already used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. You may have heard of it by brand names like Ozempic or Wegovy. Researchers wanted to know if it could help people with PAD walk farther and feel better.
The STRIDE trial included 792 adults with both type 2 diabetes and PAD. They came from 112 hospitals and clinics in 20 countries. The average age of the participants was 67, and about one in four were women.
At the start of the study, most people could only walk about 186 meters—that’s less than two blocks—before their legs started to hurt.
Half of the people in the study were given semaglutide once a week for 52 weeks. The other half received a placebo, which looks like the medicine but has no active ingredients.
Doctors then tested how far each person could walk on a treadmill at different times during the study. They also asked how their legs felt and how their daily life was going.
After a year, people who took semaglutide were able to walk an average of 40 meters farther than they could before. That’s about a 13% improvement, which may not seem like much—but in PAD, even a 10-meter improvement can be life-changing.
These patients also said they had less leg pain, better blood flow, and could do more in their daily lives. These benefits lasted even five weeks after stopping the medicine.
The researchers also found that semaglutide helped reduce the number of serious problems linked to PAD.
Only 14 people in the semaglutide group needed emergency procedures to open up blocked arteries or treat worsening symptoms, compared to 30 people in the placebo group. This means the medicine may lower the risk of hospital visits or even death.
Dr. Marc Bonaca, the lead researcher from the University of Colorado, said this is the first time in many years that a new treatment has shown real progress for people with PAD and diabetes. He also noted that the improvements seen in this study likely go beyond just weight loss.
Semaglutide may be helping the blood vessels themselves, which means it could possibly help people who have PAD but not diabetes. More studies will be needed to test that idea.
It’s important to know that all participants in this study had diabetes, so the results might not apply to people with PAD who don’t. Also, most of the participants were white and only 14% were from North America. This means we still need to learn how the drug works in other populations.
Still, this research gives hope to millions of people who struggle to walk, live with daily pain, and face serious risks due to PAD. Semaglutide could soon become a powerful new way to help them live better, more active lives.
If you care about diabetes, please read studies about bananas and diabetes, and honey could help control blood sugar.
For more health information, please see recent studies about Vitamin D that may reduce dangerous complications in diabetes and results showing plant-based protein foods may help reverse type 2 diabetes.
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