Effect of Semaglutide on the Inflammatory Biomarker High-Sensitivity CRP in Patients With Established Cardiovascular Disease and Overweight or Obesity in SELECT: A Prespecified Secondary Analysis

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Semaglutide.

Inflammation, as indicated by plasma hsCRP (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) level, is implicated as a biomarker predicting cardiovascular risk in obesity and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

SELECT provides a unique opportunity to study the relationship among hsCRP, obesity, weight loss, and MACE outcomes in semaglutide versus placebo groups.

Who Took Part

The study group was 17 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

In this prespecified SELECT substudy, the researchers evaluated whether baseline hsCRP levels predicted MACE risk and examined the relationships between changes in hsCRP levels and time to first MACE, baseline body weight, weight loss, and other clinical measures among treatment groups over time (104, 208 weeks) using multiple approaches, including Cox modeling.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The patients were allocated by chance, so the Semaglutide group and the comparison group should start out alike.

As a double-blind Semaglutide study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Semaglutide group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Inflammation, as indicated by plasma hsCRP (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) level, is implicated as a biomarker predicting cardiovascular risk in obesity and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

SELECT provides a unique opportunity to study the relationship among hsCRP, obesity, weight loss, and MACE outcomes in semaglutide versus placebo groups.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Biomarkers, C-Reactive Protein, Cardiovascular Diseases, Inflammation, Obesity, Overweight and Semaglutide.

The authors tagged it with the keywords atherosclerosis and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Semaglutide in 17 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 8 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2026 (Circulation), a journal based in United States.

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