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How comparable are liraglutide and cagrilintide on the evidence available?

Asked 15 Aug 2025Modified 8 months agoViewed 20k times
29

What I am working with: liraglutide · cagrilintide.

The comparison I want does not seem to exist anywhere in a form I can evaluate.

I have read the arguments for each and they do not engage with each other.

So which one, and on what grounds?

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VV
askedvoid_volume9.5k1515 Aug 2025

1 Answer

Accepted answer first, then by votes
31

Accepted answer

Start with what the trial was powered for. Everything else in the publication is secondary, exploratory, or a subgroup, and those three words mean three different things.

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.

Relative to absolute, worked

QuantityValueDerivation
Control-arm event rate8.0 %From the trial table, not the abstract
Hazard ratio0.80Reported
Treated event rate6.4 %8.0 × 0.80
Absolute risk reduction1.6 pp8.0 − 6.4
Number needed to treat631 ÷ 0.016
Relative risk reduction20 %1 − 0.80

The last two rows describe the same finding. Only one of them is used in headlines.

The part that matters: 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 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.

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

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CR
answered · acceptedcoring_risk27k2719 Nov 2025
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Ask PeptideStack is a static archive. Posting is closed, but the norms are worth stating: answer the question that was asked, show your working, cite the trial or the certificate, and say plainly where the evidence runs out.

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