A widely prescribed diabetes drug lowered a blood marker linked to heart-related inflammation within two weeks in a small pilot study of women with obesity and prediabetes, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center reported this week. The drug, empagliflozin, sold as Jardiance, reduced levels of monocyte-platelet aggregates, clumps formed when clotting cells stick to immune cells, which are thought to contribute to vascular inflammation and cardiovascular disease.
The findings, published in the journal Circulation, come with every caveat a 16-person pilot deserves. The study was small, involved only women taking the medication, and was neither randomized nor placebo-controlled. It measured a change in immune cells, not a reduction in heart attacks or strokes, and it does not show the pill prevents heart disease in people with prediabetes. It does not change how doctors prescribe the drug today.
What makes the work worth reporting anyway is the mechanism. Using genetic sequencing and cellular imaging, the investigators found the inflammatory cell clumps fell significantly by two weeks and further by three months, and that patients’ immune cells shifted from a hyperinflammatory state toward a steadier one, an effect they say goes beyond weight loss alone.
The team has already begun the study that would actually test the idea: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial now enrolling at Vanderbilt Health, planning 74 participants with obesity and metabolic syndrome, measuring the same immune changes over three months and adding fat-tissue analysis to understand obesity-linked inflammation.
Obesity and prediabetes are common, and heart disease develops quietly for years before it announces itself. If a drug already in millions of medicine cabinets also calms the inflammation that precedes it, that is a large public-health fact. This pilot is a reason to run the real trial, and the researchers, to their credit, are running it, not a reason to change a single prescription yet.
The result also fits a pattern doctors have watched for several years with this class of drugs, which were developed for blood sugar, proved protective for hearts and kidneys in large outcome trials, and keep revealing anti-inflammatory effects in smaller mechanistic studies. Each small study raises the same large question, how much of the benefit is the inflammation, and the Vanderbilt team’s follow-up trial is designed to move that question from plausible toward measured. Its three-month results will be the ones to watch.
US News Zone will continue to follow this story as further official information is confirmed. This article is general information, not medical advice.
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