Marissa Cole 
Adults with obesity and a raised inflammatory marker who were prescribed a GLP-1 receptor agonist had fewer deaths, heart attacks and strokes over the following decade than closely matched adults given an older weight or diabetes drug, according to a study published on 21 September in the American Journal of Cardiology. The gap was driven … Read more
Prescriptions for GLP-1 receptor agonists written to US adults with no documented reason for taking them rose roughly 15-fold between 2021 and 2025, according to an analysis of electronic health records published on 22 September in Obesity. Among 92.4 million adults whose records showed neither type 2 diabetes nor obesity with a qualifying comorbidity, about … Read more
Novo Nordisk announced this morning that CagriSema, its investigational combination of semaglutide and a second hormone, beat tirzepatide on weight loss in a head-to-head phase 3 trial in adults with type 2 diabetes: an estimated 12.4% against 9.1% at week 60. A second phase 3 trial put CagriSema at 21.0% weight loss against 2.0% on … Read more
A 225-person tirzepatide trial in Japan has reported its metabolic detail, and one finding is unusually practical: across the treatment groups, the change in waist measurement tracked the change in visceral fat — the fat wrapped around the internal organs, and the kind that carries the metabolic risk — with a correlation of 0.84. Visceral … Read more
Researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism have gone through every human brain-imaging study of GLP-1 drugs they could find – 37 of them – and report one reasonably consistent result: a single dose blunts the brain’s response to reward. Almost everything else is less settled than the popular account suggests. The … Read more
A combination of semaglutide and a second injected hormone analogue produced about 6.6 percentage points more weight loss than semaglutide on its own, according to a meta-analysis of eight randomised trials in 6,898 people published on 15 September. The combination, CagriSema, is not something a reader in the United States can fill a prescription for: … Read more
If you take a GLP-1 drug and have spinal fusion surgery scheduled, the largest synthesis of the evidence so far found no sign that the drug makes the operation riskier. A systematic review and meta-analysis published on 17 September pooled seven studies covering 28,525 adults who underwent lumbar fusion, and found no statistically significant difference … Read more
Fewer than a third of commercially insured US adults who started a GLP-1 drug for obesity were still taking it consistently a year later, an analysis of 201,229 claims records has found. About 64% fell into one of three discontinuation patterns: stopping almost immediately, stopping within a few months, or tailing off later in the … Read more