United States: Ozempic and Wegovy are some of the well-known weight loss medicines that demonstrate unbelievable improvement within a short period of time- from metabolism to ending pain, addiction, and cognition, among others.
These are seen as great early indications, as experts suggest. However, one should not forget that the fundamental side effects are still emerging.
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Recently, some experts have claimed that new obesity combat preparations – glucagon-like peptide-1 or GLP-1 receptor agonist – are potentially provoking the loss of both skeletal muscles and fat. However, there is not sufficient information that can be obtained in order to be definite.
More recently, scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada have added to the debate by introducing a subset of muscles that only develop in the heart tissue, sciencealert.com reported.
Cardiac muscles are the muscles that continuously pump our blood around our bodies, and up until now, there has been very limited knowledge regarding these tissues in relation to GLP-1 agonists.
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The researchers at Alberta gave semaglutide, which is an active ingredient in Ozempic, to both lean and obese mice without diabetes or cardiac dysfunction.
After treating the mice, obese mice reduced their body weight by approximately 30 percent and had a density of fat mass of 65 percent compared to untreated mice.
In lean mice that were given semaglutide, scientists observed a reduction of about 8 percent in the skeletal muscles after three weeks.
Despite absent alterations in heart performance and the size of the myocardial walls, both evaluated groups of mice that received semaglutide had a reduction in comprehensive cardiomyocyte mass and smaller size of these cells in the hearts, sciencealert.com reported.
However, the team of researchers headed by the clinical scientist Matthew Martens advanced further and used human cells.
In the lab, after using semaglutide on human cardiac muscle cells, their size was drastically reduced.