As chronic kidney disease rises nationwide, a new study partially conducted in Orlando suggests weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy could be part of the solution.

The pharmaceutical-industry-backed study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, followed more than 3,500 people with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease for an average of 3.4 years, including several in Orlando. One group was given weekly injections of semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, and another was given placebo injections.

The double-blind clinical trial found that kidney disease progressed more slowly in those taking semaglutide compared with those taking a placebo. They were less likely to need dialysis or a transplant.

The group taking semaglutide also had an 18% lower risk of major cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes and a 20% lower risk of death.

“This is a groundbreaking trial because it addresses this very high-risk group and provides this benefit across the spectrum of risk — kidneys, hearts and lives,” said Dr. Richard E. Pratley, a study co-author and senior investigator at the AdventHealth Translational Research Institute in Orlando.

It’s easy to forget that Ozempic wasn’t originally intended to help celebrities shed pounds for the red carpet, a diet craze that has fueled a global shortage.

Drugs with semaglutide work by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone that causes the pancreas to release insulin and makes people feel full.

The drugs are FDA-approved to help people with type 2 diabetes manage their blood sugar, to help obese people lose weight, and to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke in obese or overweight adults with cardiovascular disease.

Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, creator of Ozempic and Wegovy, funded the study and has already shared plans to use the trial’s results to apply with the Food and Drug Administration to expand the drug’s uses.

It’s likely that after this study, at least one of Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide drugs will get FDA approval for treating kidney disease too, Pratley said.

Kidney disease has become more common in recent years as rates of diabetes and high blood pressure rise. Florida alone has seen a 28.3% increase in people living with kidney failure since 2009, according to the American Kidney Fund, with over 50,000 in 2022.

About 35 million Americans have kidney disease, and 800,000 live with kidney failure.

Once this drug is approved to help, the next hurdle will be convincing doctors to prescribe it. Medical professionals can be suspicious of changes to the status quo and are sometimes reluctant even to administer already-established therapies for kidney disease, Pratley said.

Several studies have found that cost also deters some people from taking medication to manage their chronic kidney disease.

“There are a whole lot of people out there with kidney disease, and not so many people who are actually on these potentially kidney-saving therapies,” Pratley said.

That being said, questions still remain. For instance, why does Ozempic slow kidney decline?

“The short answer is: we don’t know, but there’s a lot of theories,” Pratley said.

Diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease are often interconnected, so it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a drug that targets one helps them all.

The kidney has receptors for the molecule Ozempic is derived from, which could play a role, he added. Ozempic and drugs like it also decrease inflammation, which is linked to both kidney and heart issues.

“It could be a combination of small contributions of all of these different factors,” Pratley said.

Future studies may examine whether the drug can protect people who have kidney disease but don’t have diabetes. They may also attempt to reach more diverse populations: Most of the study’s participants were white, but kidney disease disproportionately impacts minorities.

Ccatherman@orlandosentinel.com

By JONEL ALECCIA (AP Health Writer)

Cucumbers contaminated with salmonella bacteria may have sickened and hospitalized dozens of people in at least 25 states, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.

Testing detected salmonella in a cucumber distributed by Fresh Start Produce, of Delray Beach, Florida, which last week recalled whole cucumbers shipped to certain states from May 17 to May 21, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Further testing is underway to see if that strain of salmonella is causing the outbreak. The produce should no longer be available in stores.

The CDC received reports of 162 people sickened with salmonella potentially tied to the cucumbers in 25 states and Washington, D.C., between March 11 and May 16. At least 54 people were hospitalized, the agency said. No deaths were reported.

Consumers should not eat recalled cucumbers. People who bought cucumbers recently should check with the store where they purchased them to see if they’re part of the recall. Wash items and surfaces that may have been in contact with the produce using hot, soapy water or a dishwasher.

The CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also are investigating an outbreak of a second type of salmonella that has sickened at least 158 people in nearly two dozen states to see whether it’s connected to the same food. The outbreaks share several similarities, the agencies said.

Salmonella can cause symptoms that begin six hours to six days after ingesting the bacteria and include diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps. Most people recover without treatment within a week, but young children, people older than 65 and those with weakened immune systems can become seriously ill.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By JOHN LEICESTER (Associated Press)

CARENTAN-LES-MARAIS, France (AP) — Shortly after D-Day in 1944, the American soldiers heading out to more fighting against Adolf Hitler’s forces couldn’t help but notice the hungry French boy by the side of the road, hoping for handouts.

One by one, the men fished fragrant, brightly-colored spheres from their pockets and deposited them in Yves Marchais’ hands. The 6-year-old boy had never seen the strange fruits before, growing up in Nazi-occupied France, where food was rationed and terror was everywhere.

Thrilled with his bounty, the young Marchais counted them all — 35 — and dashed home for his first taste of oranges.

But also seared into survivors’ memories in Normandy are massive Allied bombing raids that pulverized towns, villages and the cities of Caen, Rouen and Le Havre, burying victims and turning skies fire-red.

The 80th anniversary this week of the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion on D-Day that punched through Hitler’s western defenses and helped precipitate Nazi Germany’s surrender 11 months later brings mixed emotions for French survivors of the Battle of Normandy. They remain eternally grateful for their liberation but cannot forget its steep cost in French lives.

Marchais remembers his family’s house in Carentan, Normandy, shaking during bombardments that sounded “like thunder” and how his mother stunned him by gulping down a bottle of strong Normandy cider when they were sheltering in their basement, declaring as she finished it: “That’s another one that the Germans won’t drink!”

“The Americans, for us, were gods,” Marchais, now 86, recalled. “Whatever they do in the world, they will always be gods to me.”

RUINED NORMANDY TOWNS COUNT THEIR DEAD

Some 20,000 Normandy civilians were killed in the invasion and as Allied forces fought their way inland, sometimes field-by-field through the leafy Normandy countryside that helped conceal German defenders. Only in late August of 1944 did they reach Paris.

Allied casualties in the Normandy campaign were also appalling, with 73,000 troops killed and 153,000 wounded.

Allied bombing was aimed at stopping Hitler from sending reinforcements and at prying his troops out of the “Atlantic Wall” of coastal defenses and other strongpoints that German occupation forces had built with forced labor.

The list of Normandy towns left ruined and counting their dead grew with the Allied advances: Argentan, Aunay-sur-Odon, Condé-sur-Noireau, Coutances, Falaise, Flers, Lisieux, Vimoutiers, Vire and others. Leaflets scattered by Allied planes urged civilians to “LEAVE IMMEDIATELY! YOU DON’T HAVE A MINUTE TO LOSE!” but often missed their targets.

Some Normans were furious. Writing before being liberated, a woman in the bombarded port city of Cherbourg described Allied pilots as “bandits and assassins” in a June 4, 1944, letter to her husband who was being held prisoner in Germany.

“My dear Henri, it’s shameful to massacre the civilian population as the supposed Allies are doing,” reads the letter, which historians Michel Boivin and Bernard Garnier published in their 1994 study of civilian victims in Normandy’s Manche region.

“We are in danger everywhere.”

NORMAN LOSSES ‘SWEPT UNDER THE CARPET’

French President Emmanuel Macron paid homage to civilian victims in commemorations on Wednesday in Saint-Lo, recalling how the Normandy town became emblematic of losses from Allied bombing when it was razed on June 6 and 7, 1944. The death toll was 352, according to Boivin and Garnier’s study. Playwright Samuel Beckett dubbed Saint-Lo “The Capital of the Ruins” after working there with the Irish Red Cross.

Macron said Saint-Lo was “a necessary target” because Allied bombers were aiming to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the invasion beaches and described it as “a martyred town sacrificed to liberate France.”

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Those killed in Saint-Lo included Marguerite Lecarpentier’s older brother, Henri. She was 6 at the time. Henri was 19 and he’d been helping another man pull a teenage girl out from under debris when the town was bombarded again. All three were killed. Marguerite’s father later identified her brother’s body “because of his shoes, which were new,” she said.

When her family subsequently fled Saint-Lo, they crossed through what was left of the town.

“It was terrible because there was rubble everywhere,” Lecarpentier recalled. Her mother waved a white handkerchief as they walked, “because the planes were constantly flying overhead” and “so we’d be recognized as civilians.”

Still, Lecarpentier speaks without rancor of Allied bombing. “It was the price to pay,” she said.

“It can’t have been easy,” she added. “When one thinks that they landed on June 6 and that Saint-Lo was only liberated on July 18 and they lost enormous numbers of soldiers.”

University of Caen historian Françoise Passera, co-author of “The Normans in the War: The Time of Trials, 1939-1945,” says Normandy’s civilian casualties were overshadowed for decades by the exploits of Allied soldiers in combat and their sacrifices.

Although towns held remembrances locally, she noted that it wasn’t until 2014 that a French president — Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande — paid national homage to Normandy’s civilian dead.

Until then, because France had been bombed by its liberators, “this was not a subject that could be raised very easily by French authorities,” Passera said.

“Civilian victims were swept under the carpet somewhat to not offend the Americans,” she said. “And to not offend the British.”

But for Normans, D-Day and its aftermath were “a bit of a confusion of feelings,” she said. “We cried with joy because we were freed, but we also cried because the dead were all around us.”