Archive for August, 2023
August 21, 2023 — How much might the application of new insights from the SELECT study of treating obesity do for preventing heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. A first pass at answering this question appeared in Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy last week. Nathan Wong, Hridhay Karthikeyan, and Wenjun Fan estimated the potential for semaglutide treatment to lower cardiovascular disease […]
August 19, 2023 — The intersection of high U.S. drug prices with its high obesity rates is creating some unusual economics. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare released an analysis this week that brings this into sharp focus. The analysis tells us that published prices for GLP-1 medicines used for obesity and diabetes are the […]
August 18, 2023 — Health disrupting chemicals are spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet. Even on the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, they’re showing up. Through carcinogenicity or obesogenicity, they can wreak havoc with our health. But as we follow the public discourse about the bad actors, one thing becomes quite clear. Carcinogenicity prompts alarm […]
August 18, 2023 — We are clearly on a path toward better obesity medicines, but reflecting on decades of work on this, clearly, the path is twisted. Describing this path, Gina Kolata writes: “Every so often a drug comes along that has the potential to change the world. Medical specialists say the latest to offer that possibility are the […]
August 18, 2023 — “Of the following what do you think is the number one threat to American public health at this moment?” Given a list that included guns, alcohol, cancer, COVID, obesity, opioids, smoking, driving, or something else, three top choices were clear. Opioids (chosen by 26%), obesity (23%), and guns (20%) outpaced everything else. The others were […]
August 17, 2023 — A recently published report by the Institute for Government offers a succinct dissection of UK obesity policy in the past 30 years in the UK, culminating with recommendations for reform. Context and Complexity As a fairly new clinical academic, caring for real people and trying to produce relevant research to influence change, I am relatively […]
August 16, 2023 — “If you thought that GLP-1 agonists would replace bariatric surgery you are wrong.” Neil Floch is not alone in saying this and new research adds to the reasons we suspect that he is right. In JAMA Surgery, Jessica Mok and colleagues tell us that one plus one equals three with the combination of bariatric surgery […]
August 15, 2023 — Can a simple program to promote drinking water prevent obesity in elementary schools? Well, no. But a new study in Pediatrics does tell us that promotion of drinking water can indeed prevent weight gain in elementary school students. Many well-intended childhood obesity programs have a nil effect. So it’s delightful to point to a well-controlled […]
August 14, 2023 — Headline writers are fond these days of depicting a “craze” among prescription writers for new obesity medicines. But in fact, it seems that long-standing prescribing patterns may promote more weight gain than weight loss. A new paper by Erik Almazan, Jessica Schwartz, and Kimberly Gudzune documents prescribing for medicines that promote weight gain in 36 percent […]
August 13, 2023 — Subtly buried in the excitement about results of the SELECT trial is an issue of disparities. The fact is that this is largely a study of White males. Less than four percent of persons in this study were Black, ten percent were Hispanic, and 76 percent were non-Hispanic White. Males comprised 72 percent of the […]