Weight is a number on a scale. Walking further before your leg hurts is something a person notices on the way to the shops. Trials that measure the second are rarer and more useful, and this one is worth reading precisely because its result is small enough to argue about. It also belongs on a price site, because a modest benefit and a large bill is the commonest shape a purchase takes here — the same question asked in is a GLP-1 worth what it costs.
What was tested
Between October 2020 and July 2024, 1,363 patients were screened and 792 randomized to semaglutide or placebo [1]. All had symptomatic peripheral artery disease and type 2 diabetes, which is a population closer to the one in the cardiovascular result than to a weight-loss trial. A quarter were female, the median age was 68, and the primary outcome was the change in maximum walking distance at week 52.
What it found
The semaglutide arm's median walking distance at 52 weeks was 1.21 times its own baseline. The placebo arm's was 1.08 times. The estimated treatment ratio between them was 1.13 (95% CI 1.06 to 1.21, p=0.0004).
That is the number to hold onto, and it is easy to misread in the flattering direction. The drug did not make people walk 21% further; it made them walk about 13% further than they would have anyway. The placebo arm improved too, which is what a trial exists to reveal.
Who it does not cover
Everyone in the trial had type 2 diabetes. The authors say so explicitly in their own interpretation and call for studies in peripheral artery disease without it. A reader with claudication and no diabetes is outside what this result establishes, which is a limit worth stating rather than glossing.
Setting it against the price
Across the 432 injected semaglutide figures recorded here, the median billed rate is $179 a month, read September 2026 — $2,148 for the 52 weeks this trial ran. That buys, on this evidence, about a 13% relative improvement in how far someone can walk before stopping.
Whether that is worth it is a judgment rather than a calculation, and it is a judgment nobody selling the drug will make for you. What the trial does is put a real number on one side of it. Everything else this site measures — the fees outside the headline, what the figure does at a higher dose, whether the price survives a re-read — sits on the other, and is collected in what a GLP-1 actually costs and the headline is not the bill.