Archive for August, 2024
August 31, 2024 — This is a truly remarkable finding. In the middle of the SELECT study of semaglutide for preventing deaths in people with obesity and heart disease, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. So researchers nimbly adapted and began collecting data on COVID outcomes. They found a big surprise. People who got COVID-19 and were treated with semaglutide had […]
August 30, 2024 — Scientists have a pretty good handle on how to predict a person’s risk of diabetes and how to diagnose it. The gold standard is a glucose tolerance test. How does your body handle glucose? But diabetes is just one dimension of dietary disease risk and nutrition scientists are hungry for a better way to predict […]
August 29, 2024 — It is a pain to sort through the errors that find their way into research publications. Even more painful is the experience of having to retract flawed publications. So when the Editor in Chief of Childhood Obesity retracted a fundamentally flawed, cluster-randomized trial, we see a reason to celebrate. Errors that involve clustering designs in […]
August 28, 2024 — Type 2 diabetes prevalence is up and the Lancet Regional Health has a simple way to reduce it. Daniel Windred and colleagues write: “Advising people to turn off their lights at night, or use lights that reduce the circadian impact (dim and “warm” light), is a simple, cost-effective, and easily-implementable recommendation that may promote cardiometabolic […]
August 27, 2024 — That was quick. At about 6 am today, we posted to say that obesity drug prices are stuck in the spotlight. “Bold leadership on obesity drug pricing and access to care is the only thing that will bring relief from this uncomfortable spotlight,” we wrote. Before the end of the hour, Lilly took the cue. […]
August 27, 2024 — How big might the semaglutide budget bomb be? The authors of a new brief report in Annals of Internal Medicine today are making a point. How threatening can we make this sound? Right up front in their title, they label their estimates as the “maximum costs of expanded Medicare coverage of semaglutide for cardiovascular risk […]
August 26, 2024 — New research reminds us of something that just about any person living with obesity can tell you. The prevailing bias against people living with obesity favors medical neglect. Especially for someone living with significant obesity, it is all too common to have providers dismiss medical complaints or blame them on obesity and simply instruct the […]
August 25, 2024 — When neuroscientists coined the phrase brain plasticity, they were certainly not thinking about microplastics accumulating in our brains. But unfortunately, it seems this is a phenomenon with implications we need to study. New NIH-funded research, published as a preprint, suggests these tiny particles are building up at an alarming rate. But it does not tell […]
August 24, 2024 — Novo Nordisk is creeping up on an indication for semaglutide in people with obesity and heart failure. Today in Lancet, we have another piece of the puzzle to suggest this drug might help. In a prespecified analysis from the SELECT study, researchers found that semaglutide reduced heart attacks, strokes, deaths, and problems with heart failure […]
August 23, 2024 — A new paper this week reminds us of the enduring fascination with causal pathways for obesity. Why has the prevalence grown so relentlessly? How can we reverse it? This preoccupation has been the source of controversy and mistakes in dealing with obesity. One of the more memorable controversies is the back-and-forth debates between David Ludwig […]