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Tirzepatide tops the charts for blood sugar and weight loss in type 2 diabetes

A major analysis reveals which GLP-1 drugs deliver the best results for glucose control, weight loss, and side effect profiles, offering new clarity for diabetes care decisions.

Study: Efficacy and safety of GLP-1 agonists in the treatment of T2DM: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Image Credit: ALIOUI MA / Shutterstock

In a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, a group of researchers ranked the glycemic, weight, cardiovascular, and safety outcomes of eight Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1 RAs) versus placebo and standard antidiabetic drugs in adults with Type II Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) using a Bayesian network meta-analysis.

Background

Every ten seconds, someone worldwide develops T2DM, a chronic condition that inflates household medical bills and doubles the risk of heart attack. Global prevalence is projected to climb to 643 million people by 2030, spurring an urgent search for treatments that lower glucose without promoting weight gain.

GLP-1 RAs stimulate insulin secretion and curb appetite, but clinicians face a crowded shelf of brands differing in dose, duration, and cost. Families, policymakers, and insurers all seek the treatment that maximizes benefits while minimizing drawbacks, highlighting the ongoing need for comparative research.

About the study

Investigators conducted a systematic review and Bayesian Network Meta-Analysis (NMA) in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Network Meta-Analyses statement and registered the protocol in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews. PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, Web of Science, and Chinese databases were searched from inception to 2 October 2024.

Eligible studies consisted of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving adults with T2DM that lasted at least eight weeks and compared twice-daily Exenatide (EBID), once-weekly Exenatide (EQW), Semaglutide, Albiglutide, Lixisenatide, Dulaglutide, Liraglutide, or Tirzepatide against one another, placebo, or conventional antidiabetic therapies such as insulin, metformin, sodium-dependent glucose transporter 2 inhibitors, dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors, or sulfonylureas.

The analysis combined oral and injectable Semaglutide into a single category for statistical assessment, reflecting their similar efficacy.

Reviewers independently undertook study selection, data extraction, and Cochrane risk-of-bias assessment, resolving disagreements by consensus. The analysis first assessed changes from baseline in Glycosylated Hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) and Fasting Plasma Glucose (FPG).

Additional endpoints encompassed body weight, Body Mass Index (BMI), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP, DBP), total cholesterol (TC), high-density and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C, LDL-C), and any reported adverse events.

Results were pooled as mean differences (MD) or risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Whenever between-study variability (I²) exceeded 50%, a random-effects model was employed, and heterogeneity was evaluated using the Chi-squared test.

Study results

Sixty-four eligible trials, including 25,572 participants, formed a dense evidence network. Compared to placebo, every GLP-1 RA reduced HbA1c, yet the effect size varied sharply.

Tirzepatide achieved the greatest absolute drop (MD −2.3 percentage points, 95 % CI −2.7 to −1.9), followed by Semaglutide (−1.5) and Liraglutide (−1.2); Lixisenatide’s reduction of −0.56 ranked last.

When benchmarked against traditional drugs pooled across insulin, Metformin, Sodium-Dependent Glucose Transporter 2 inhibitors, Dipeptidylpeptidase-4 inhibitors, and sulfonylureas, only Tirzepatide (−1.5), Semaglutide (−0.73), Liraglutide (−0.40), Dulaglutide (−0.34), and EQW (−0.36) retained statistical superiority.

For FPG, the hierarchy was similar: Tirzepatide lowered levels by −3.1 millimoles per liter, Semaglutide by −2.0, and Liraglutide by −1.6 millimoles per liter, compared to placebo; short-acting agents and Albiglutide produced a minimal change. The Surface Under the Cumulative Ranking Curve analysis assigned Tirzepatide a 100% probability of occupying the top position for both glycemic outcomes.

The therapies diverged further on weight. Against placebo, Tirzepatide resulted in a weight loss of −9.1 kilograms, Semaglutide −2.8, EBID −1.8, and Liraglutide −1.2; other agents were weight-neutral. Notably, EBID resulted in greater weight loss than liraglutide in this comparison.

Compared to conventional treatment, every GLP-1 RA except Albiglutide reduced weight, with Dulaglutide and Lixisenatide also demonstrating significant weight reduction. Tirzepatide’s −10 kilograms again led the field.

Blood Pressure, BMI, and lipid fractions showed no statistically significant differences across interventions, implying that glycemic and weight advantages occur without observed short-term changes in cardiovascular parameters. Albiglutide was found to be ineffective in improving weight outcomes versus traditional drugs.

Gastrointestinal complaints constituted the dominant safety signal. Semaglutide, Dulaglutide, Liraglutide, Lixisenatide, and Tirzepatide each tripled the risk of nausea and vomiting compared to placebo; the risk approximated parity when compared with legacy drugs already notorious for gastrointestinal intolerance.

Hypoglycemia profiles diverged: EBID and Semaglutide increased episodes (RR 3.3 and 4.6, respectively) relative to placebo, whereas Liraglutide and Lixisenatide significantly reduced the risk compared with traditional regimens.

Other adverse events, including nasopharyngitis, headache, and elevations in lipase, did not differ materially. Node-splitting and loop inconsistency tests revealed no significant incoherence between direct and indirect evidence, and funnel plots were symmetrical, supporting the credibility of pooled estimates.

Collectively, the analysis crowned Tirzepatide as the most potent agent for glucose lowering and weight loss, with Semaglutide a consistent runner-up. Tirzepatide’s dual agonism of GIP and GLP-1 receptors may underpin its superior efficacy.

Liraglutide delivered moderate glycemic benefits coupled with a neutral or protective hypoglycemia footprint, which may be advantageous for leaner or older adults at risk of underweight or hypoglycemia, suggesting a niche for patients intolerant to Semaglutide or at high hypoglycemic risk.

Short-acting formulations and Albiglutide rarely dominated any outcome, underscoring the clinical shift toward once-weekly or dual-agonist molecules. These rankings remained stable across subgroup and sensitivity analyses, bolstering confidence in their relevance for clinicians.

Conclusions

To summarize, long-acting GLP-1 RAs outshine older therapies by combining robust glucose control with meaningful weight loss in adults living with T2DM.

This NMA shows that Tirzepatide delivers the strongest overall profile, followed closely by Semaglutide, while Liraglutide balances efficacy with the lowest risk of hypoglycemia. Short-acting agents and Albiglutide offer limited additional value. Clinicians should consider a patient’s weight goals, gastrointestinal tolerance, and susceptibility to hypoglycemia when selecting among agents.

Policymakers and payers can prioritize Tirzepatide or Semaglutide for obesity-related diabetes, reserving Liraglutide for individuals with leaner body types or those who are sensitive to hypoglycemic episodes in everyday clinical practice worldwide.

Journal reference:

Ren, X., Hua, H., Wu, Y. et al. (2025) Efficacy and safety of GLP-1 agonists in the treatment of T2DM: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Sci Rep 15, 2410, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-09807-0, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09807-0

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July 8, 2025

James Gunn Confirms Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman Part II’ Script Is Done

As the Man of Steel takes to the sky in James Gunn‘s DCU debut, Matt Reeves‘ The Batman is ready to emerge from the shadows.

On the red carpet of Monday’s Superman world premiere, the writer and director kept it brief as he confirmed to reporters that he’s read Reeves’ long-anticipated script for The Batman Part II.

“It’s great,” said Gunn after Reeves shared a photo of the completed script’s cover page last month, donning the Batman symbol.

The DC Studios boss previously told fans to “get off Matt’s nuts” about the sequel to his 2022 take on the Dark Knight.

Premiering July 11 in theaters, Gunn’s Superman will launch a new DCU with the ‘Gods and Monsters’ phase, separate from Reeves’ ‘Batman Epic Crime Saga’, which includes The Batman (2022) and last year’s Max series spin-off The Penguin.

After Gunn previously defended the delays on The Batman Part II, which is set to premiere on Oct. 1, 2027 following a year-long postponement, Reeves said in January that the sequel will film this year.

“We’re doing something where the story continues from, but I hope that people will be surprised by,” he told Deadline.

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July 8, 2025

Indian shares to open muted on tariff jitters; Trump says India deal close – Reuters

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July 8, 2025

China’s Renewable Surge: Unlocking the Next Phase of Decarbonization – ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office

China stands at a pivotal point in its climate transition journey. While the road to carbon neutrality remains long and demanding, the country’s rapid and remarkable progress in renewable energy deployment has already started to transform its emissions profile. The key challenge now is to sustain this momentum through deeper decarbonization, especially by tackling key infrastructure and policy constraints.

Between 2020 and 2024, China experienced strong growth in both energy consumption and carbon emissions, even as overall economic growth slowed. Energy consumption rose by 4.7 percent annually on average, while emissions grew by 3.9 percent, both growing faster than in the preceding five years. These trends have put pressure on meeting China’s interim climate targets under the 14th Five-Year Plan, as energy and carbon intensity reductions are both lagging behind schedule.

At the core of this dynamic is surging electricity demand. As sectors such as transportation and manufacturing accelerate electrification, electricity consumption has risen by nearly 7 percent annually in recent years. The power and transport sectors now account for most of the country’s emissions growth, while industrial emissions—particularly from steel and cement—have stabilized due to the ongoing property market adjustment.

Yet, amid this challenge lies a powerful opportunity. China is rapidly emerging as the world’s leading force in renewable energy development. In 2023 and 2024, China added a combined 649 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity, representing around 60 percent of total global additions. Since 2020, its installed solar and wind capacity has tripled. The electricity generated by renewables reached 1,830 terawatt-hours in 2024, roughly equivalent to the total electricity consumption of China’s entire tertiary sector.

However, the growth in clean power generation has not fully kept pace with the rapid expansion in installed capacity, and fossil fuels—especially coal—remain a critical backstop for meeting China’s soaring electricity demand. Between 2021 and 2024, approximately 45 percent of incremental power consumption was met by coal or other fossil fuel-based generation.

This presents a paradox: despite record growth in installed renewables capacity, reliance on fossil generation remains substantial.

The main constraint is inadequate transmission infrastructure. Many renewable resources are concentrated in remote inland provinces, far from coastal areas which have high power demand, creating geographical imbalances in supply and demand. In contrast to the rapid expansion of renewable generation, investment in power transmission has also been lagging, with total power sector investment falling from 66 percent in 2018 to just 35 percent in 2023.

As a result, grid limitations are increasingly hindering renewable electricity from reaching end users. Curtailment rates for wind and solar, i.e. the proportion of generated electricity that was wasted or not dispatched due to grid limitations or oversupply, have risen in the past two years, signaling that transmission capacity is struggling to keep pace with generation. Without a stronger grid backbone, much of China’s clean energy potential remains underutilized.

Addressing this challenge will require stepped-up investment in ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, smart grid technologies, and energy storage solutions to enhance flexibility and manage intermittency.

Integrating renewables into grid operations is a necessary first step, but doing that alone would not be sufficient. The recent Spain–Portugal blackout highlights the operational risks associated with rising renewable penetration. To enhance overall grid resilience and ensure system stability, China must also invest in advanced voltage control, synthetic inertia, distributed energy storage, and stronger inter-regional transmission links, gradually reducing its reliance on fossil backup.

In parallel, deeper reforms in China’s power sector can help ensure clean energy generated is delivered efficiently and fairly. Building a truly integrated national electricity market—through the development of real-time and spot trading platforms, greater regional interconnection, and more flexible electricity pricing—will be essential to maximize the value of clean power. Reforming dispatch protocols to prioritize low-carbon generation and fostering competition across provincial boundaries can further accelerate the green transition.

The good news is that the turning point may be near. In the first quarter of 2025, the increase in China’s renewable electricity generation outpaced the growth in overall power demand. If this trend continues, China’s power sector emissions could peak this year—a major milestone on the path to reach its 2030 and 2060 climate goals.

Today, China’s clean energy transformation is already reshaping the global energy system. Its next phase—which is set to emphasize on integration, efficiency, and reform—will determine how quickly and effectively the transformation leads to sustaining emissions reductions.

If China can align its infrastructure and institutions with the pace of its renewable expansion, the country will not only meet its climate targets, but also set a new global benchmark for how to scale decarbonization in a fast-growing, energy-hungry economy.

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July 8, 2025

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 review: Specs, features, price

The Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD won’t win awards for speed, but it will certainly keep your portable data safe.

Transferring data between devices can be done in a few ways, but it’s hard to do it securely via offline means. Shifting important documents to a flash drive is convenient, especially for travel, but less so if someone else gains access to it.

Unless there’s encryption or something else in the way, a stolen drive will leak its secrets with relative ease.

The Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 tries to solve the portable security issue, by being a personal encrypted Fort Knox for your data.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Design

Your typical external storage usually consists of an enclosure with a port on one end for you to connect to nearby devices, often over USB. Kingston goes a lot further than that.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: The large screen is used to unlock the drive

The drive itself is rounded, and has a fairly typical size of at 4.8 inches long, 3.3 inches wide, and 0.7 inches thick. You don’t have any protruding connectors, but you do have a supplied pair of cables to connect to the USB-C port, via both USB-A and USB-C on the host.

The front also has a mounted touchscreen, which would give casual observers the impression it was an MP3 player. At least, if it didn’t have the IronKey branding right below it.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Protection

The main selling point of the IronKey Vault Privacy 80 is that it is an encrypted SSD. It’s a drive that has onboard hardware encryption, which works entirely independently of the operating system of the connected device.

Blue electronic device with a digital keypad on a dark surface. The screen displays numbers, with 'IronKey' branding below. A cable connects to the top.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Unlocking the drive by entering a code on the screen

That is to say, it doesn’t matter what device you connect the drive to, so long as it can support a USB mass storage device. The IronKey handles the security for itself.

This security includes XTS-AES 256-bit encryption using a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified secure microprocessor. All that is also certified to FIPS 197, too.

In use, the display is the main interaction point for the drive, in terms of security. You connect it to a host computer, then you enter a passcode onto the display.

To prevent anyone from brute force attacking the drive, a process will automatically crypto-erase the drive if the Admin and User passwords are wrongly entered 15 times in a row. This is just the default, as you can adjust this from 10 tries to 30 tries.

Blue IronKey data device with a screen displaying a lock symbol and status updates. Connected by a cable on a dark surface.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: The drive is readable, but a tap will re-lock it

The password used with the drive can be between six characters and up to 64 characters in length. The user can also set up password rules affecting the letters and numbers used.

For business environments, there’s also the option to set up multiple passwords, so that an admin can have access to all of the features and settings.

Users can also set up an automatic timeout, locking the drive after a selected period of time. This is handy for situations such as if someone leaves the drive hooked up to a computer, to prevent any impromptu snooping of the data.

Going further into being protective, there are options for randomize touch-screen layouts to prevent others from watching someone tapping codes in from afar. A dual read-only mode uses two levels of protection to prevent the writing of data.

There’s also a digitally-signed firmware to protect against BadUSB attacks.

The drive comes formatted in exFAT.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Connectivity and storage

Connecting using USB 3.2 Gen 1, which has a maximum throughput of 5Gbps, the IronKey Vault Privacy 80 is offered in multiple sizes. AppleInsider was provided with a 7,680GB capacity, though others are available with 960GB, 1,920GB, and 3,840GB.

The actual connection speed of the drive itself is a bit lower than that theoretical maximum of 10 gigabit per second USB-C. With 250MB/s reads and 250MB/s writes on average, it’s not what you’d call a fast SSD.

It still has the advantages of no hard drive platter seek time, but don’t expect Thunderbolt speed.

And, that’s fine for what the drive is for.

Disk speed test interface showing write speed at 296.9 MB/s, read speed at 212.9 MB/s, alongside a compatibility checklist for video formats and performance metrics.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Speed testing using Black Magic’s Disk Speed Test

While slow compared to other SSDs, you do need to bear in mind that our tested speeds are with a fully-encrypted drive. It’s safe to say that it’s not going to be a drive used by anyone who needs fast access to stored materials.

Content creators aren’t going to be editing from this drive, but they are also not the target market.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: Tough, for those who really need it

Secure external password-protected storage drives are certainly a limited market, but one that also has a lot of customers. With data protection being a thing enterprise customers seek due to various online and in-person threats, companies still want drives that are portable yet highly secure.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review: The bag supplied with the drive

The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 is small enough to be portable, offers enough capacity to be useful for large data troves, and with a considerable amount of security to boot.

This is not a drive that the average consumer will really need, but it’s great to toss in a safety deposit box with crucial backups. For business users, it’s a drive that can easily become part of a security framework for highly sensitive projects.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review – Pros

Highly secure

Compact

Color touch screen with high accuracy

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD review – Cons

Relatively slow transfer speeds

Price is high, but warranted

Rating: 4 out of 5

The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 does what it says it will do. It will security vault data that isn’t speed-critical, and will do it without depending on one OS or another. Not everybody needs something like this, but if you’ve got a key set of data that you just can’t let fall into the wrong hands, this will keep it safe for you.

Where to buy the Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 Encrypted External SSD

The Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 is available from Amazon, starting from $279.99 for the 960GB model, with the 1.92TB at $369.99, the 3.8TB at $762.99, and the 7.6TB at $1,037.99. Current discounts as of July 7, 2025 price the 960GB model at $239.99, and the 1.92TB at $289.99.