COIOS
Healthcare today Item refines peer-reviewed

Carried to US veterans, liraglutide's three-year benefit rises from 1.6% to 4.6%

Reweighting the LEADER trial onto US Veterans Affairs cohorts with type 2 diabetes gave a three-year absolute reduction in major cardiovascular events of 4.6% (95% CI 2.2-7.0) against 1.6% (0.3-2.9) in the trial itself, on intervals that overlap.

The authors reweighted individual-level results from the LEADER placebo-controlled trial of liraglutide onto Veterans Affairs cohorts with type 2 diabetes, balancing baseline characteristics between the trial and the target population. Transported three-year risk differences were larger than the trial's own, 4.6% (95% CI 2.2-7.0) for major adverse cardiovascular events and 2.9% (0.8-5.1) for all-cause mortality against 1.6% and 0.9%. The confidence intervals overlap, so this is a shift in the central estimate rather than a demonstrated difference.

Why it is interesting: It puts a number on how far a GLP-1 trial's effect moves when carried to a higher-risk population the trial under-represented.

Source
American Journal of Epidemiology, 22 September 2026
DOI
10.1093/aje/kwag236
Type
Peer-reviewed article
Design
Transportability analysis reweighting the LEADER randomised trial onto US Veterans Affairs cohorts with type 2 diabetes, using augmented inverse probability weighting and approximate balancing weights
Verdict
Refines prior evidence
Driver
Obesity, diabetes and GLP-1
Driver
Changing behaviour at scale