Wegovy pills are just as good as jabs for weight loss but may not come with the same heart benefits, a study has suggested.

A review of existing data on weight-loss medicines concluded that while people lose weight, most obesity drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro do not meaningfully improve quality of life.

Few drugs show heart benefits at one year and the more weight people lose the higher the chance of side-effects such as stomach problems and loss of lean muscle, according to the research published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The study looked at 19 currently available and emerging obesity drugs, in 262 studies and involving 99,791 people. They followed up for 12 to 172 weeks.

Compared with lifestyle changes alone, the largest weight loss after one year was with Mounjaro (tirzepatide, 14.9 per cent) and new jab CagriSema (14.8 per cent).

This was followed by Wegovy pills (oral semaglutide, 10.9 per cent), orforglipron pills (9.9 per cent), injectable Wegovy (semaglutide, 9.8 per cent), and phentermine-topiramate pills (8.1 per cent).

Emerging drugs – including retatrutide, ecnoglutide and mazdutide – showed large effects on weight loss but were supported by low or very low certainty evidence, researchers said.

Mounjaro led to the highest fat lost (by 25.7 per cent) but also the biggest loss of lean body mass such as muscle (8.3 per cent).

Experts also found that Wegovy injections were the only drug linked to a lower risk of death from any cause (19 per cent), heart attack (28 per cent) and heart failure (57 per cent).

Mounjaro reduced the heart failure risk by 51 per cent.

No drug convincingly reduced kidney failure or showed clinically important improvements in quality of life, researchers, including from China, Norway and Canada, said.

This comes as private waiting lists are believed to have soared close to 100,000 as Britons scramble to secure the Wegovy Pill, after it was approved in the UK last month.

For now, the oral medication - a tablet version of the once-weekly Wegovy injection - will be available only through private providers. 

Some healthcare providers are offering the first month's treatment for as little as £60 as they battle for market share following the drug's long-awaited rollout in the UK.

Pharmacy bosses say they are seeing 'unprecedented' demand for the tablets.

Discussions about making the treatment available on the NHS are understood to be taking place soon, although no timetable has yet been announced. 

The BMJ authors added that most clinical trials had relatively short follow-up, limiting conclusions about long-term safety, quality of life and effects on heart and kidney health.

They said their review offered an up-to-date look at the drugs, adding: 'Treatment decisions for obesity should be individualised, balancing expected benefits, harms, treatment burden, costs, availability and patient preferences.'

In an accompanying editorial, medics from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, US, said the 'growing number of new obesity drugs is welcome news for clinicians and over a billion people worldwide living with obesity or overweight'.

They said the new study 'represents an important step in providing comparative information to inform patient-clinician discussions about obesity drugs in this rapidly evolving landscape of treatment options'.