No-zempic?
Ozempic-like drugs were originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes — but authors of a new study say they are increasingly being used for weight loss instead. Now, there are fears of potential shortages.
“This data suggests that more healthcare providers are seeing the benefits of these medications for treating obesity, which is a significant public health shift,” said Dr. Yee Hui Yeo, a clinical fellow at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“However, it also raises concerns about potential medication shortages and the need to ensure that patients with diabetes still have access to these treatments,” Yeo warned.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic mimic the GLP-1 appetite-suppressing hormone the body naturally produces after eating.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Ozempic in 2017 to treat Type 2 diabetes in adults. The med helps the pancreas produce more insulin to regulate blood sugar levels.
The agency greenlit Wegovy (which, like Ozempic, contains semaglutide) in 2021 for adult weight loss. In one clinical trial, Wegovy users shed an average of 12.4% of their initial body weight.
“Essentially, after the medication was approved for obesity, [GLP-1 drug] use took off so quickly that we lost control and vision of how fast people were picking up these medications, and the trends of use are uncertain,” said Dr. Ali Rezaie, medical director of the Cedars-Sinai GI Motility Program.
Yeo and Rezaie, co-first authors of the study, analyzed medical records for about 45 million Americans who visited a doctor between 2011 and 2023.
They found about 1 million new users of GLP-1 drugs during that period — they were mostly white women with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, which is considered obese.
Meanwhile, the proportion of new users with Type 2 diabetes decreased.
“New [GLP-1] prescriptions among those with obesity or relevant [related] conditions without Type 2 diabetes doubled, with a notable uptick in medication use especially since 2020,” Rezaie said.
The researchers also found that most people were in their mid-50s when they started using the drug.
Plus, they reported that semaglutide has dwarfed liraglutide in popularity. The FDA approved liraglutide, under the brand name Saxenda, to treat obesity in 2014 and the Victoza brand for Type 2 diabetes in 2010.
In the Cedars-Sinai study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the team led by Rezaie and Yeo acknowledge that the TriNetX database they used for their analysis may not represent the national population.
Nevertheless, Rezaie says there needs to be “careful monitoring” of “prescription patterns” for GLP-1 drugs because while they “offer several benefits, they are also associated with various common and uncommon side effects.”
Common side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain. More rarely, there have been reports of an eye condition that causes blindness, hair loss and behavioral changes. Users tend to quit taking the drugs if they are frustrated by the side effects.
A prominent diabetes researcher, whose hormone work helped pave the way for Ozempic, said in a paper published last week that the next step is to test how effective these drugs are in preventing chronic disease and reducing substance abuse.
