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 […]
September 11, 2024 — In every way we look at this study, it is a remarkable milestone. With a randomized, controlled trial, Claudia Fox and colleagues have shown that a GLP-1, liraglutide, is effective for obesity in children as young as six years of age. In this year-long study, children who received liraglutide for obesity reduced their body mass […]
August 1, 2024 — On the theme of “Is there anything GLP-1s can’t do?” a new randomized controlled trial is coming at us from the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. It showed promising signs that a GLP-1, liraglutide, might slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Liraglutide is used under the brand name Victoza to treat type 2 diabetes. At higher […]
June 26, 2024 — One of the four dimensions that sum to a terrible problem of inadequate scale in obesity care is cost. Right now, the list prices for obesity medicines like semaglutide and tirzepatide in the U.S. put them out of reach for all but the wealthy and the well-insured. So will it help that a generic GLP-1 agonist – […]
May 30, 2024 — In a world that systematically denies people access to obesity medicines, the rush of reports that people frequently stop taking them makes us wonder. How does this qualify as news? Why do reporters repeatedly paint a misleading picture of non-compliant patients? Yet, health reporters keep offering up this narrative. The latest prompt for this is […]
February 24, 2024 — This sounds like a godsend. “Weight loss jabs could be a more effective and cheaper treatment for drug addiction than rehab, a study suggests.” So says the Telegraph of London. The “weight loss jabs” they’re talking about are liraglutide 3 mg daily injections, also known by the brand name of Saxenda. Sad to say, they […]
February 17, 2024 — Reporting for Reuters, Robin Respaut and Chad Terhune tell us that prescription data in the U.S. reveals increasing use of semaglutide for obesity in adolescents. Does this signal a huge surge in pediatric obesity treatment? Or merely a small uptick from almost negligible access to care? That all depends on the story you want to […]
January 30, 2024 — It created quite a stir last week when Epic Research published an analysis suggesting that weight regain in the real world does not look the same as a placebo-controlled trial. After all, regain is quite an important subject. Obesity is clearly a chronic disease, requiring chronic care. But lots of people try to avoid this […]
January 25, 2024 — One of the more annoying generalizations in obesity is the assertion that when people lose weight, everyone inevitably regains it all and perhaps even more. When said about metabolic surgery, it’s utterly false. But that doesn’t stop people from saying it – even people who pose as medical experts. More broadly in the medical management […]
March 8, 2023 — We would classify this as a report of a side effect. But it’s not really an adverse event. It seems that for some people, the use of semaglutide has prompted less alcohol use. In the New York Times, Dani Blum describes the experience of one patient: “In August 2022, Eva Monsen’s endocrinologist prescribed Ozempic [semaglutide] […]
