March 31, 2021 — Editors note: after this post appeared, significant questions arose about errors in the Acosta paper described below. We will offer more information when more is available. Precision medicine will transform healthcare. So say Francis Collins and Joshua Denny with a new commentary in Cell. It’s all about accounting for the individual in healthcare by accounting […]
March 29, 2021 — Cancer is one of the risks of obesity that many people do not appreciate. Diabetes and heart disease have links to obesity that many people understand. But cancer as a complication of obesity has not made the charts. Nonetheless, obesity clearly raises the risks of 13 different kinds of cancer. A new study in Gastroenterology […]
March 24, 2021 — If you had any doubt about prior reports that semaglutide is likely to be a “game changer” for obesity care, perhaps you should look at JAMA today. Just one month after another paper in JAMA, semaglutide is back in the journal. This time, it is a 68-week study that shows the value of maintaining therapy […]
March 13, 2021 — Eight years have passed since the American Medical Association decided obesity really is a complex chronic disease. For treating this disease, we have more options now. We have a handful of anti-obesity medicines that are new. A new study in Obesity Surgery tells us their use has more than doubled over the last decade. So […]
March 5, 2021 — Focusing on childhood obesity for Obesity Care Week, we have a basic question are we ready to be helpful? Because truthfully, our record on this subject has been spotty. Way back in 1974, the Lancet told us “we need to be more vigilant in preventing obesity throughout childhood.” But since then, the prevalence of childhood […]
March 4, 2021 — Today is World Obesity Day and this day of global attention presents a basic question. Are we all about the problem? Or in the spirit of OCW2021, can we turn up the volume on solutions? Preferably solutions that are actually helpful. Because frankly, the world’s attention span is short. For too long, the world has […]
March 2, 2021 — Today in Obesity Care Week (OCW2021) the focus is treatment and prevention of obesity. Note that the focus is both. Not one or the other. For decades now, we have watched ineffective talk about a false choice: shall we resolve to treat obesity or prevent it? “We can’t treat our way out of this epidemic,” […]
February 26, 2021 — “Medical care is nice, but it’s surely not the answer to obesity. Behaviors matter.” These words came to us from the audience of a webinar for a regional business group on health. Oddly enough, those words came on the same day that JAMA published yet another major study on semaglutide for treating obesity. Two weeks […]
February 22, 2021 — When NEJM recently published impressive results for a new obesity treatment, it caused quite a stir. Now it looks like semaglutide might have some serious competition coming right behind it. Late last week, Lilly announced results for two phase 3 studies of tirzepatide. These were both studies for type-2 diabetes. Effects on body weight were […]
February 21, 2021 — There’s a new mantra making the rounds, but it’s really not so new. Let’s follow what the science says. That’s well and good, except that the science is seldom as definitive as we would like. In fact, when you dig into the details of any given study, you may find surprises – or more questions […]
