I keep checking ClinicalTrials and three recruiting semaglutide studies show 62, 200, and 140 enrolled. Then there's a completed one with 30, and an active-not-recruiting one with 609. I'm trying to understand why the recruiting numbers are so different.
Are these different phases, different populations, or just different site counts? I've been tracking fasting glucose and A1c on my own labs for a while, but the trial enrollment pattern is what's puzzling me. Anyone else notice this?
The 609 one is active, not recruiting, so that's a different snapshot. Comparing it to 62 seems apples and oranges.
Right, but the 30-person completed one still nags at me. Pilot?
Probably a pilot. Phase 1 studies often have tiny n.
The 200 recruiting study might just have more sites. That can explain a bigger number without a different phase.
Some listings update slowly, so the number can lag behind screening.
The 609 one being active-not-recruiting is the clue. That number is probably post-enrollment.
Right, and if it's an extension or safety follow-up, 609 makes sense. The 30-person completed one looks like an early signal study.
Has NCT02079870 posted results yet? The 30-person completed one is the one I want to see.
No results I can find. The recruiting trio might be different formulations.
Worth knowing before you compare options: that 62/200/140 split is probably just oral versus injectable. The part people forget is that pill arms tend to need more adherence data before those numbers mean much.
That's what I was thinking. The 140 one could be the oral arm.
I've been in a different semagultide trial, not one of these, and screening took forever. Site staff told me enrollment numbers on ClinicalTrials can sit unchanged for weeks even when they're actively screening. So 62, 200, 140 might not mean what we think.
The 609 study probably already finished enrollment and is in follow-up. The completed 30-person one is the outlier I'd love to see results for.
The 62 is almost never the goal, it's usually just how many people have actually been randomized as of the last site update.
I watched one listing sit at 9 for about seven months, then jump to 71 in three weeks once a second site opened, so that number says way more about site startup than about the study itself. Are you filtering by phase when you compare them?
Phase is doing a lot of the work in those gaps. A small phase 2 tolerability study in one specific population might be designed around 60-80 people, while a big phase 3 in a broader population can be built around 600+, so 62 vs 609 isn't strange, they're basically different animals.
The 140 and 200 are probably mid-size or just multi-site.
The trap is that ClinicalTrials shows actual enrolled bodies but also an estimated enrollment target, and people blend the two constantly. I keep a nerdy little spreadsheet with NCT number, phase, estimated vs actual, and the last update date, and honestly the update date is the tell.
Some pages go stale for a year, so a low number might just mean nobody's touched the listing. If two of yours say phase 2 and one says phase 3, that alone explains a lot of it.
Site count is the other half of it. One center running a small mechanistic study can only randomize so fast, while a 40-site network can pull 200 people in a quarter.
Screening failure is brutal too, seems like 3-4 screened for every 1 randomized, so the visible number always lags behind what's actually happening on the ground.
Honestly the number I trust least is the enrollment count and the one I trust most is my own Sunday morning log. I've been writing down fasting glucose and waist at the same time every week for about nine months, and the trial listings have never once told me anything useful about my own trend.
What turned it around for me was realizing these recruiting numbers mostly reflect funding and site IRB approvals, not how promising anything is. I used to read a small number as early and exciting, now I read it as probably just started.
If you're comparing trial figures against your own labs, the labs are the part that actually moves. Are you logging weekly or just when you get a draw?
The A1c part is what messes with your head. It's a 90-day average, so you can do everything right for three weeks and watch it sit still. My fasting glucose bounced 12 points day to day from a late dinner or bad sleep. I log it but only look at the 7-day average now. Less spiral.
My clinic's front desk couldn't tell me which arm I was in. I stopped trusting the listings after that.
Twenty-two weeks in, my scale had moved 4 pounds total and I nearly quit. What kept me sane was a pair of jeans from two summers earlier that I couldn't button without lying down first.
Same mirror, same awful lighting, one photo every Sunday. Week 8, nothing. Week 11, a half-inch gap at the waistband, which the scale would never have shown because I was also walking a lot more.
Here's the reversal nobody warns you about: week 16 I was up 2 pounds and the jeans fit better than they had at week 12. Turned out I'd been measuring my waist wrong, pulling the tape snug instead of keeping it level. Once I fixed that, my waist dropped 2.5 inches while my weight basically flatlined.
My A1c went from 5.9 to 5.6 over about six months and just held there. Now I weigh once a week on Tuesday mornings, log waist at the navel, and trust the fabric over the number.
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