How comparable are semaglutide and cagrilintide on the evidence available?

For reference: semaglutide · cagrilintide.

These are treated as interchangeable and I do not think they are.

If both are acceptable I would like to know that, so I can stop thinking about it.

What is the actual trade-off, and does it matter at the scale I am working at?

Concretely, this is answerable from the published record, but only if you take the placebo arm seriously rather than reading the active arm alone.

Placebo arms in this class are not nothing. Lifestyle-intervention placebo arms in the major obesity trials commonly lose two to three per cent of body weight, so an active-arm figure quoted without its comparator overstates the drug effect by roughly that much.

The part that matters: duration decides what can be seen. A 68-week trial can measure weight and glycaemia; it cannot measure anything whose event rate is one per cent per year without enrolling tens of thousands.

One qualification: absence of a signal in a trial of this size is not evidence of absence for a rare event. It is evidence that the event is rarer than the trial could detect.

Read the protocol and the statistical analysis plan if the result matters to you. Both are usually published alongside.

The honest answer here is that the published evidence supports part of the claim and is silent on the rest, and it is worth being precise about which part is which.

Confidence intervals matter more than point estimates when two trials disagree. Two studies reporting fifteen and twenty per cent whose intervals overlap heavily have not disagreed about anything.

Trial populations are selected. Exclusion criteria in this class routinely remove people with significant renal impairment, prior pancreatitis and unstable psychiatric illness, which is exactly the population the results are then quoted for.

The cardiovascular outcome programme in this class runs to several large randomised trials — LEADER for liraglutide, SUSTAIN-6 and SELECT for semaglutide, REWIND for dulaglutide — and they are the reason the class is discussed as more than a weight intervention.

Be careful about generalising from a trial population to yourself. The exclusion criteria are usually the most informative page in the supplement.

Quote the interval alongside the estimate and half the disagreements on this site would not start.

The short version: the effect is real, the magnitude depends on the population, and the population is usually the part that gets dropped when a result is quoted second-hand.

Non-inferiority and superiority designs are not interchangeable. A non-inferiority result says the new agent is not meaningfully worse against a pre-specified margin — it does not say it is as good, and it certainly does not say it is better.

Where a result is quoted from a conference abstract rather than a peer-reviewed publication, the numbers routinely move between the two. It is worth checking which one you are reading.

If a claim cannot be traced to a named trial with a named endpoint, treat it as a claim rather than as evidence.

Before comparing two trials, check whether they share an endpoint definition. Frequently they do not, and the numbers then are not comparable in any sense.

Intention-to-treat and per-protocol analyses answer different questions. ITT asks what happens if you offer the treatment; per-protocol asks what happens if it is taken as directed. The gap between the two is a measure of how tolerable the protocol was.

Registry entries at ClinicalTrials.gov carry the pre-specified primary endpoint with a timestamp, which is the cheapest available check on whether an endpoint was changed after the data were seen.

The caveat is that trial evidence is about licensed product administered under supervision. None of it transfers automatically to research-grade material of unverified content.

When two sources disagree, the answer is almost always in the methods section of the one you have not read.

edited 15 Feb 2025 by Dr_Ilse_Vandenberg — added the method parameters