Dr.KarenChen said:

Relative and absolute effects need reading together.

Pushing back on Dr.KarenChen here. I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them. The results probably generalise, and "probably" should be stated as an assumption rather than dropped.

Happy to go further on any of that.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator. Three questions, and they resolve most disagreements in these threads.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

CarlaRPh_TPA said:

I would add the less popular caveat: these trial populations under-represented several groups, older adults and the highest BMI categories among them.

Coming at CarlaRPh_TPA’s question from a different direction. The gap between trial results and real-world results is consistent and it is not fraud. Trial participants get titration by protocol, scheduled contact, free drug and dietetic support; removing that infrastructure costs a few percentage points every time it has been measured. When your own curve sits below the published mean, that is the likeliest explanation before anything about you or your material.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

How to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases?

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Update — my curve sits below the published mean and the explanation is that the trial arm had support I do not have. That was reassuring rather than otherwise.