OW2024: The Expanding Scope of GLP-1 Therapy Benefits

As we travel to San Antonio for ObesityWeek 2024 (OW2024) one of the principal threads we want to explore is the expanding scope of GLP-1 therapy benefits. The narrative is a moving target. We won’t have the abstracts in hand for another day. But news this week makes it clear that we have barely gotten started on filling out the list of health benefits that semaglutide, tirzepatide, and a host of newer compounds might deliver.

Most strikingly, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week has captured our attention. In a 68-week study of 407 persons with obesity and osteoarthritis of the knee, researchers showed a dramatic effect on both body weight and knee pain.

An Outsized Effect

No surprise, patients who received semaglutide had a 14% reduction in body weight on average. But the remarkable finding was an outsized effect on knee pain. David Felson of Boston University said that study “changes the landscape” for pain reduction with osteoarthritis of the knee because it is greater than anything possible without knee replacement surgery.

Robert Carter, Deputy Director of the NIH institute that deals with arthritis and musculoskeletal disease, was even more bold in his assessment:

“The magnitude of the improvement is of a scope we haven’t seen before with a drug. They had an almost 50 percent reduction in their knee pain. That’s huge.”

Life Changing Therapies for More Than Weight Loss

What this tells us is that the scope of life-changing benefits that GLP-1 therapy can bring will be growing dramatically. At ObesityWeek, experts will be digging into the implications for cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and prevention of diabetes. But this is only the beginning.

We fully expect it will become apparent that the implications of these potent medicines for obesity are much broader than weight loss. ObesityWeek this year will giving us a glimpse of some of that potential.

Click here for the study in NEJM on osteoarthritis of the knee, here, here, and here for further perspective.

Sketch of a Knee 1886, drawing by Vincent van Gogh / WikiArt

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November 2, 2024