Research

Hormonal

SGLT-2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists reduce all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and kidney failure in patients with type 2 diabetes, with absolute benefits scaling with baseline cardiovascular and renal risk.

If you have type 2 diabetes, especially with existing heart or kidney risks, adding an SGLT-2 inhibitor or GLP-1 agonist to your current regimen significantly reduces your risk of dying from heart or kidney causes. The higher your baseline risk, the greater the absolute benefit. Discuss these specific drug classes with your doctor to leverage these organ-protective effects.

WeakSupportsHIGH confidence
Both classes of drugs lowered all cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and kidney failure (high certainty evidence)... The absolute benefits of these drugs vary substantially based on cardiovascular and renal disease risk profiles of patients with type 2 diabetes
Suetonia C. Palmer et al. · BMJ · 2021

Why this rating

High certainty evidence based on 764 RCTs and 421,346 patients using GRADE assessment.

Source

Sodium-glucose cotransporter protein-2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists for type 2 diabetes: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Suetonia C. Palmer et al. · BMJ · 2021

DOI 10.1136/bmj.m4573

Meta-analysis · 764 studiesCited 670×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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