What changed during treatment?
Semaglutide acts like GLP-1, a gut hormone involved in fullness and blood sugar. Wegovy and Ozempic contain semaglutide, but their approved uses differ. The ingredient's name doesn't tell you everything about a particular medicine.
In a 68-week weight trial called STEP 1, adults with excess weight and without diabetes lost about 15% of their weight on average with semaglutide, compared with about 2% with placebo, a dummy treatment. Both groups had lifestyle support.
That's a useful result, with a clear time window. It's also a group average. It can't tell a reader exactly how much their own weight would change, or whether that change would last after treatment.
And after it stopped?
The follow-up to that weight trial watched a smaller group for a year after semaglutide and structured lifestyle support ended. On average, people previously on semaglutide regained about two-thirds of the weight they'd lost.
That doesn't cancel the earlier result. It adds the next chapter. Because the support ended too, this study can't pin every later change on stopping the medicine alone.
A separate trial called SELECT looked at heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths. It found fewer of those events overall with semaglutide than with placebo. The participants already had cardiovascular disease and excess weight, without diabetes; that context belongs with the finding.
I wouldn't turn that into a prediction about every reader's heart. It answers a different question from the weight trial, in a different group of people.
The warnings belong here too
The Wegovy label lists nausea, vomiting and other stomach problems. Pancreatitis means an inflamed pancreas; that and gallbladder trouble also appear among its warnings. Severe fluid loss from vomiting or diarrhea can harm the kidneys.
Its boxed thyroid warning comes from tumors seen in rodents. Whether this happens in people is unknown. The label rules the medicine out for people with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid cancer, or MEN 2, a rare inherited condition.
Compounded semaglutide is not FDA-approved. Approved semaglutide products have their own uses and warnings. A prescriber needs someone’s health history to weigh those; this page can explain the research, but it can’t make that personal decision.