Saxenda dosage: what the label actually says

Who does the label cover, and who does it not?

Patients aged 12 and older are covered if they weigh more than 60 kg and have obesity. The climb can run to 8 weeks rather than 4, a step can be taken back down, and 2.4 mg is allowed as the dose to stay on where 3 mg is not handled well. Nothing is established under age 12.

The Saxenda label does not cover type 2 diabetes, and says outright that nothing has been established for children aged 12 to 17 who have it. It also rules out taking it with another liraglutide product or with any other GLP-1 drug.

What if a week gets missed?

A missed day is skipped rather than made up. The label says to take the next scheduled dose and not to add one or raise it. Past 3 days without a dose, it sends a person back to 0.6 mg and through the four-week table again.

What does it come in?

The device matters for dosing, because some of these hold one dose and some hold four.

Saxenda and Victoza are the same drug. So why are the doses different?

Victoza is the same drug substance from the same manufacturer, approved for blood sugar rather than weight, and its label stops at 1.8 mg a day where this one goes to 3 mg.

Both products contain liraglutide, and both come from Novo Nordisk. They were approved under separate applications, NDA 206321 and NDA 022341, for different groups of people. A separate application means a separate schedule, a separate top dose and a separate rule for a missed week.

The practical version: Saxenda stops at 3 mg and Victoza stops at 1.8 mg. Neither label sets a dose for the other one’s patients.

Both labels print 0.6, 1.2 and 1.8 mg. Those are the same amounts of liraglutide on either label. What changes is where each one sits. 1.2 and 1.8 mg are steps you pass through on Saxenda, and doses the Victoza label says you can stay on.

The Victoza dose schedule in full

How long does it take to reach the 3 mg dose?

The label’s own table puts 3 mg at week 17 at the earliest.

Saxenda has 4 steps between the 0.6 mg start and the 3 mg ceiling. The label asks for at least four weeks on a dose before the next one. Four weeks at each step is where week 17 comes from.

That figure is not our arithmetic. The label prints the week numbers itself, and the last row reads “Week 5 and onward”.

Week 17 is a floor, not a schedule. Nothing in the label says a person has to keep climbing, and a slower rise is a decision for whoever wrote the prescription.

Can you stay on a low dose of Saxenda?

Yes at 2.4 mg, which is the lowest dose this label recognizes as one to stay on.

The label names 2.4 and 3 mg as doses to settle on. 2.4 mg is the lowest of those. Below it the label is describing a climb, not a destination.

0.6, 1.2 and 1.8 mg are printed on the same ladder and are not on that list. The label treats them as somewhere you pass through.

The label sets doses. It does not rank them, and it does not say a higher one suits a given person better.

How does the Saxenda ladder compare with every other GLP-1 brand?

Saxenda tops out at 3 mg once a day. Eight brands in this class stop in eight different places.

The table below compares the approved GLP-1 brands by their highest labeled dose. It is the only place the eight ladders are set out together.

Milligrams do not carry across molecules. 3 mg of liraglutide is not comparable to 3 mg of anything else. The last column says so on every row where the drug substance differs.

Where two brands do share a drug substance, the comparison is real, because the same molecule is being measured. That is the case for exactly two pairs in the class.

Do the side effects change as the dose goes up?

The label does not publish side effects broken out by dose for Saxenda. It reports them across a whole trial.

This is the question the trial tables cannot answer. A label counts how many people reported something over a study, not which dose they were on that week.

The escalation itself is the closest thing to an answer the label gives. It exists because moving up slowly is how the trials were run. The four-week interval is part of the approved schedule, not advice added later.

Where a figure does exist it sits on the side-effect page for this brand. It is taken from the label’s own trial table, with the arm it belongs to.

Where to read next

2 pages sit next to this one, and each answers something this page deliberately does not.

• The liraglutide dosage chart covers the drug rather than the brand, including the vial and syringe arithmetic no pen needs.
• What Saxenda costs reads the price off the manufacturer’s own terms rather than the label, including who those terms shut out.