Obesity rates have declined slightly in the United States, and while it’s too early to tell whether this trend will continue or what’s causing the change, experts say weight loss drugs will continue to reduce obesity and reduce associated health risks. I believe that it may play a role in this.
These drugs – including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro – are called GLP-1 agonists and were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes. But they also hold great promise in treating obesity and other health conditions such as heart disease, kidney and liver problems, sleep apnea, asthma, complications of COVID-19 and cancer. I am sending it to you.
Rosalina McCoy, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and lead author of the Nature study showing the benefits of GLP-1 on cardiovascular health in people with type 2 diabetes, said, “All obesity-related symptoms improved. “I’ll do it,” he says.
These drugs have “transformed” diabetes treatment because they actually improved health outcomes, she said. This is a first for type 2 diabetes. Helps prevent heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, and death. Other diseases associated with metabolic dysfunction, such as fatty liver disease (formerly known as fatty liver disease), also lack effective treatments until now.
“Typically, nothing works and I think everything is overblown,” said Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. But, “I’m really, really excited about the possibilities here.”
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the obesity rate among U.S. adults age 20 and older fell from 41.9% from 2017 to 2020 to 40.3% from 2021 to 2023. At the same time, severe obesity rose from 9.2% to 9.7%.
This is not the first time that overall interest rates have fallen. Obesity rates in the United States have increased fairly steadily in recent decades, with a slight decrease in 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, for example, and then an increase.
Mr McCoy said the rise in severe obesity was alarming. This is because severely obese people are the group with the highest risk of poor health. “I don’t think that study is reassuring. I think it’s a sign that we’re still going in the wrong direction.”
But “at least it’s not increasing,” said John Morton, an obesity physician and associate director of bariatric surgery at Yale School of Medicine.
Determining trends typically requires years of data, and peaks are usually only visible long after they have been reached, he said. “I think there’s still a lot of work to be done, but there may be some glimmers of a plateau.”
Morton said it was “certainly possible” that GLP-1 was involved in the small reduction in obesity, but cautioned that other factors were also at play.
“Another possibility could be the new coronavirus. The two main risk factors for death from the new coronavirus were age and weight,” he said. “So I still don’t know what to do.”
He also pointed out that “a new epidemic is coming” because obesity rates among young people are exceptionally high.
But he welcomes the interest in and oversight of obesity treatment. “It’s been really hard to draw attention to this issue,” he said.
What surprised me was how quickly it worked, how quickly the improvement in mortality appeared.Jeremy Faust, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
He said he is “grateful” for GLP-1 drugs because they have provided patients with more options and encouraged discussion about the health effects of obesity.
He believes they could play a role in improving obesity and other health conditions, especially if there are drug formulations that can be taken orally rather than injected. “It will really benefit the population,” he said.
“What surprised me was how quickly it worked, how quickly the improvement in mortality appeared,” Faust said. He likened the high-risk state of obesity to being near the edge of a cliff. Drugs seem to help pull patients back from the brink. “People who were ‘supposed’ to die within a year did not suddenly die. This is surprising to me,” he says.
Faust even hypothesized that the increase in severe obesity may reflect high-risk patients living longer due to better treatments. If more people fall into this category than leave it, he theorized, that rate would rise.
Approximately one in eight (12%) American adults say they have taken a GLP-1 agonist, and 6% currently take one. About half of them said they could not afford medicines.
Since 2018, Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, has generated $50 billion in revenue, 72% of which comes from the United States.
Skip past newsletter promotions
Get the most important US headlines and highlights sent straight to your email every morning
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may include information about charities, online advertising, and content sponsored by external parties. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and are subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
After newsletter promotion
This high cost is one reason McCoy doesn’t believe GLP-1 will have an impact on obesity rates in much of the population.
“A drug that costs $1,000 a month and is available to a select few. That’s not the way to solve public health problems like obesity,” McCoy said. “Those are effective treatments that we need to access and use. But if we’re really going to tackle the problem of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, we need to understand what’s causing this problem in the first place. We need to find the root cause.”
Still others are more optimistic about the role GLP-1 can play in reducing obesity across the population.
“We have turned obesity into some sort of moral sin, rather than the true nature of it being a metabolic problem,” Faust said. It’s great to pay attention to your diet and health habits, but “we’ve been trying to do that for a long time. Play with the board you have, not the board you wish you had.” ”
Prevention is important, but “you need both,” Morton says. “Just like with heart disease and cancer, we need both prevention and treatment to truly combat this.”
When you stop taking the drug, your weight will return to about two-thirds. However, it is not uncommon for people with chronic conditions such as asthma, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure to take medications for long periods of time, even throughout their lives.
“We don’t go into treating other health conditions by saying, ‘I don’t know if I should treat your high blood pressure because I might have to stop taking this medication in the future.'” says McCoy. “I think these questions are partly due to the stigma that comes with obesity…Obesity is a serious chronic disease that needs to be treated.”
Side effects include nausea and vomiting, and rare side effects include gastroparesis, small intestinal obstruction, and pancreatitis. Given these potential risks, the drugs should only be given to those who need them, experts said.
“Honestly, it’s not just patients with diabetes, but patients who are obese. These are the patients who are at the highest risk of harm and who would benefit the most,” Morton said. For these patients, the benefits often outweigh the potential risks.
“GLP-1 drugs have actually been around for over 20 years,” Morton says. “If you’re going to see a lot of complex problems, you’re probably already seeing them.”
Now, more treatments may be covered by insurance as research is uncovering benefits for related health conditions. This is because insurance plans such as Medicare do not cover obesity treatments, but they can pay for treatments that reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. , sleep apnea and other conditions.
Researchers are also investigating the potential for these drugs to treat problems such as substance use disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and mental health. However, these links are less established than other health benefits.
“We have to be careful because there are very likely many other diseases, from addiction to mental health, for which these drugs will have just as great an effect,” Faust says. he said. “But I think we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
