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
A systematic review has pulled together 26 economic evaluations of the approved weight-loss drugs, and the pattern it reports is worth knowing before anyone quotes “cost-effective” at you. Semaglutide came out ahead of liraglutide consistently enough that the authors call liraglutide generally not cost-effective. Tirzepatide bought the most health of any drug reviewed, and frequently … Read more
Semaglutide’s highest-dose weight-loss trial put a small group of its participants inside an MRI scanner, and the results speak to the question that trails every GLP-1 drug: what happens to muscle. Among 55 people drawn from the 1,407-person STEP UP trial, fat volume fell sharply over 72 weeks, thigh muscle volume fell by an amount … Read more
Three physicians at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute have published a review that does something the injectable-peptide market rarely gets: a compound-by-compound account of what is claimed, what mechanism is proposed, and what could go wrong. It covers BPC-157, TB-500, CJC-1295 and ipamorelin, MK-677, melanotan-II, GHK-Cu, retatrutide and … Read more
Three endocrinology clinics in Madrid scanned 388 adults with obesity four times over six months on GLP-1 drugs and report that skeletal muscle mass fell by 1.46 kg while mean body weight fell 11.3%. Visceral fat area dropped by 40.6 square centimetres. On those numbers the muscle loss is modest next to the fat loss, … 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