January 31, 2025 — For persons with obesity and prediabetes, one of the best ways to prevent diabetes onset is quite clear. Treat the obesity to reduce the excess adiposity. The Diabetes Prevention Program established this with a study in the NEJM way back in 2002. A prescription of diet and exercise could cut the risk of diabetes in […]
January 30, 2025 — A new paper in JAMA Network Open documents just how dizzy the pace of change in prescribing for obesity care has been in the last seven years. Prescriptions for obesity medicines have doubled. Phentermine prescribing has grown – it’s generic, cheap, and effective. Even now, it accounts for almost half of obesity medicine prescriptions. But […]
January 29, 2025 — FDA yesterday approved Ozempic (semaglutide) to prevent kidney failure and death in persons with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. This fits with one of the five trends for this year: the steady expansion of health benefits for advanced medicines used in obesity and diabetes. But note that this approval covers the use of […]
January 28, 2025 — It is fascinating to watch the public discourse about newly proposed criteria from the Lancet Commission for a clinical diagnosis of obesity unfold. The headline is easy. “It’s time to move beyond BMI alone.” The response to that idea has been clear and unmistakable: “What took so long?” But then comes the hard part that […]
January 27, 2025 — A new paper this morning in Nature Medicine tells us that interrupting liver disease in obesity is possible with metabolic surgery. More specifically, in an observational study of patients with obesity and cirrhosis due to MASH, Ali Aminian and colleagues found a 72% lower risk of major complications from liver disease in patients who received […]
January 26, 2025 — The most pervasive way of thinking about obesity is to simply regard it as “a diet-related disease.” But a new paper in Nature Food suggests we may be misleading ourselves. That’s because of a fundamental problem in the data that links patterns of diet to obesity and health. An impressive collection of scientists examined the […]
January 25, 2025 — The race to innovate beyond semaglutide and tirzepatide for obesity can be utterly confusing. More than a hundred new drugs are in various stages of development and analysts expect more than a dozen to be launched within the next five years. But right now, all we have are tantalizing – and sometimes disappointing – results […]
January 24, 2025 — An important new paper in JAMA Pediatrics this week tells us that pediatric obesity treatment can improve a person’s health into young adulthood. Anecdotally, health professionals have seen it. Logically, many have long believed it. But this is the first time we have clear evidence for the health benefits of effective pediatric obesity treatment. In […]
January 23, 2025 — It was easy to see this coming. Our top prediction for the new year was that the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity would be big news and the spark for a big debate. The news splash was unmistakable. From 92 countries all over the world, more than 3,000 persons lined up for the launch event. […]
January 22, 2025 — One of the most important shifts in the approach to obesity in recent years has been an increased focus on the lived experience with this disease. One result has been the identification of food noise as a subjective experience that greatly affects the quality of life for many people living with obesity. Now, new research […]
