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Anti-obesity drug has life-changing benefits for arthritis

Clinical-trial participants saw their knee pain abate and could engage better with activities that got them up and going.
  1. Traci Watson

    1. Traci Watson a senior editor for news and research highlights at Nature. She is based in Washington DC.

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Coloured X-ray of the knees of a patient with severe osteoarthritis, shown in blue and orange colours

Osteoarthritis, which causes stiff and painful joints, affects the knees most often.Credit: Dr. P. Marazzi/Science Photo Library

A blockbuster weight-loss drug sharply reduces pain from obesity-related arthritis in the knees and improves people’s ability to engage in activities such as walking. That’s according to a clinical trial conducted in 11 countries — the first of its kind to show that one of the wave of innovative anti-obesity drugs can treat arthritis. The drug, semaglutide, provided pain relief on a par with opioid drugs.

At the end of the trial, many participants’ pain had subsided enough that they were no longer eligible for the study, says Henning Bliddal, a rheumatologist at Copenhagen University Hospital at Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg who helped to conduct the trial. “They got a therapy that was so effective that they more or less were treated out of the study,” he says.

The results are “important and could be helpful” for people with knee osteoarthritis, says Leigh Callahan, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The findings were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The trial was sponsored and designed by Novo Nordisk, which is based in Bagsværd, Denmark, and makes semaglutide, a drug sold as Ozempic for treating diabetes and Wegovy for treating obesity. Bliddal served briefly as a paid consultant to the company during trial planning.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03512-0

References

  1. Bliddal, H. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 391, 1573–1583 (2024).

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