April 18, 2025 — The news in obesity research these days is so full of headlines about a multitude of new medicines in development that it is easy to lose count. All too often, these are early stage or even pre-clinical notions of a potential treatment. So yesterday, it was good news indeed to hear that a once-daily oral […]
April 16, 2025 — Back in October, JAMA Network Open published a research letter suggesting that metabolic surgery numbers were “plunging” because of GLP-1 medicines. They claimed to observe a 26% drop in surgeries between 2022 and 2023 for privately insured patients. A few months later, the authors issued a correction and said the actual drop was more like […]
April 15, 2025 — This is puzzling. When we saw a new systematic review of therapies for childhood obesity, we were intrigued. It popped up in JAMA Network Open on Friday, clearly focused on central (abdominal) obesity in youth. The authors used waist circumference (WC), waist-to-height ratio, waist-to-hip ratio, and WC z-score as measures of this. But there is […]
April 14, 2025 — The first update to Canadian guidelines for pediatric obesity in two decades is out today. The authors grounded them in the best available science. They crafted them with the values of children and families at the center of their process. In short, these are very solid guidelines. But there’s just one little problem. The scarce […]
April 5, 2025 — We should be used to this by now. For years, we’ve urged policymakers to find a way out of the box that has Medicare denying coverage for obesity. This time, it seemed we were close. But close doesn’t count. Late yesterday, the Trump administration said “CMS is not finalizing” provisions of a proposed rule that […]
March 31, 2025 — A new interview with ConscienHealth founder Ted Kyle offers a long view of more than two decades of work on obesity. The interview explores a core question that people ask all the time: Are we making progress in flipping the script on obesity? Or are we still fighting the same misunderstanding of obesity that has […]
March 29, 2025 — These are indeed interesting times for folks who care about the need that so many people have for obesity care. Medicines for obesity, with the advent of GLP-1 agonists, have become much better. Thus the demand for metabolic surgery has slipped a bit. Most metabolic surgeons have seen this in the volume of cases that […]
March 27, 2025 — Yesterday in JAMA Network Open, researchers from the University of Michigan published a finding that older Americans say Medicare should indeed cover obesity medicines. Authors Lauren Oshman and colleagues present straightforward conclusions: “In this survey study of older US adults, most participants agreed that Medicare should cover weight management medications and more than half of […]
March 26, 2025 — In the U.S., we are at a critical point for the sourcing obesity medicines. March 19 was the last day that FDA would tolerate large scale compounding of tirzepatide on account of the now resolved shortage of that drug. The same milestone for semaglutide is coming up on May 22. Some people are not happy. […]
March 24, 2025 — There’s no denying it. More people are getting access to care for obesity than ever before. In part this is because health professionals have a range of tools for providing that care. GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide and tirzepatide are a big part of that.But those drugs carry a price tag that is blowing up pharmacy […]
