Effects of retatrutide on body composition in people with type 2 diabetes: a substudy of a phase 2, double-blind, parallel-group, placebo-controlled, randomised trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Retatrutide in this randomized controlled trial publication.

This substudy assessed percent change from baseline to week 36 in total body fat mass versus placebo and dulaglutide.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are teenagers, young adults, adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and parallel-group study.

Because people in this Retatrutide study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Retatrutide.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Retatrutide could be set against what happens without it.

Groups ran in parallel: each of the participants stayed in one arm throughout.

This phase 2, double-blind, parallel-group, placebo-controlled, randomised controlled trial was done in 42 medical centres in the USA.

The prespecified primary substudy endpoint was percent change from baseline to week 36 in total fat mass, as measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA).

The completed trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04867785.

What Was Measured

This substudy assessed percent change from baseline to week 36 in total body fat mass versus placebo and dulaglutide.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Body Composition, Hypoglycemic Agents, Glucagon-Like Peptides, Recombinant Fusion Proteins, Immunoglobulin Fc Fragments and Fatty Acids.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Retatrutide.

Results are reported in around 11 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2025 (The lancet. Diabetes & endocrinology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Retatrutide compound page, all human trials.