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A brand new technology of weight-loss medication has confirmed remarkably efficient, massively common and massively profitable in the previous few years, although they do have some drawbacks.
After France on Friday turned the most recent nation to permit all medical doctors, moderately than simply specialists, to prescribe these medication, listed below are some key questions on them.
How do they work?
Essentially the most well-known of this new wave of medication are Danish pharma agency Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, in addition to US firm Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro.
These medication improve the motion of a hormone within the pancreas referred to as “glucagon-like peptide 1,” or GLP-1, the title given to this household of medicines.
The hormone impacts the secretion of insulin, so was first focused to develop medication to fight diabetes.
However it turned out that GLP-1 medication additionally suppress folks’s urge for food by making them really feel fuller.
A revolution?
Weight problems consultants now agree that these medication are a historic breakthrough within the historical past of individuals attempting to drop pounds. Beforehand, surgical procedure was the primary choice for weight problems when food regimen and train didn’t work.
That is no small feat. Weight problems impacts 900 million folks worldwide, in what is taken into account a significant disaster.
The brand new medication “cover a major unmet need: obesity was one of the only chronic diseases for which there were few medications,” French endocrinologist Emmanuel Disse informed AFP.
Throughout scientific trials, the medication have been discovered to cut back folks’s weight by a median of 15% to twenty%.
Limitations?
Nevertheless these medication do have some limitations, together with unwanted side effects.
The semaglutide drug utilized in Ozempic has been permitted for diabetes since 2017, so there may be now almost a decade of analysis on its use.
A big examine utilizing well being knowledge from a whole bunch of hundreds of US veterans printed in January discovered that GLP-1s should not linked to the next threat of coronary heart issues or suicidal ideas, as had beforehand been steered.
Nevertheless there are uncommon circumstances of great unwanted side effects, akin to injury to the pancreas, it stated.
Extra generally, they will additionally trigger nausea, vomiting, migraines and disturb sleep, which may flip some sufferers off the medication.
Additionally they don’t work for everybody—some folks taking the medication don’t drop pounds.
And the impact solely lasts when persons are taking the drug, that means that they probably want lifelong therapy.
They’re additionally costly, generally costing over $1,000 a month in the USA to 300 euros ($340) in France.
The medication are additionally solely accessible in injectable varieties—although pharma corporations are creating day by day drugs which have proven promise in early trials.
Who ought to use them?
Nationwide well being businesses have emphasised that these medication ought to solely be prescribed to obese or overweight folks for whom issues like train and food regimen have failed.
Nevertheless there may be loads of proof that some people who find themselves not obese use the medication merely to lose a couple of additional kilos.
France’s ANSM medicines authority stated that these medication ought to “not be used for weight loss for aesthetic purposes,” warning that inappropriate use might expose folks to “adverse effects that are sometimes serious.”
What subsequent?
Steven O’Rahilly, head of Cambridge College’s Institute of Metabolic Sciences, informed AFP he was assured there might be “a pretty rapid evolution of drugs that are more effective, with fewer side effects, cheaper and more convenient.”
“It may be more of a challenge to combine all those four advances in a single medicine,” he added.
With billions of {dollars} at stake, pharma corporations are racing to be the primary to market with a brand new therapy.
Novo Nordisk’s experimental drug amycretin could possibly be much more efficient than present GLP-1s, based on early trial outcomes printed in The Lancet on Saturday.
There has additionally been a rising discipline of analysis revealing the potential advantages of GLP-1 medication past weight problems.
They’ve been linked to enhancements for a variety of maladies, together with dementia and dependancy. It’s nonetheless unclear if these are a direct impact of the medication, or are linked to enhancements with weight problems or diabetes.
© 2025 AFP
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