Semaglutide and Cardiovascular Outcomes

Taqueti, Viviany R. M.D., M.P.H.
Shaw, Leslee J. Ph.D.

^aBrigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA [email protected]
^bIcahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this letter was reported.

New England Journal of Medicine 390(8):p 766, February 22, 2024. | DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2400414

To the Editor: In the SELECT trial, Lincoff and colleagues (Dec. 14 issue)¹ found that weekly subcutaneous semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, was superior to placebo in the reduction of cardiovascular events at 3 years in patients who had preexisting cardiovascular disease and overweight or obesity but who did not have diabetes. In contrast to previous semaglutide trials involving patients with overweight or obesity (in which 74.1% of the patients were women),² only 27.7% of the patients in the SELECT trial were women. Could this striking difference have resulted from the definition of “preexisting cardiovascular disease” as previous …