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 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
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
Asked to choose between hypothetical weight-loss drugs, 800 American adults ranked how a drug is taken above how much weight it takes off. In a discrete-choice survey published on 17 September, route of administration was the single most important attribute driving choice, ahead of average weight loss, cardiovascular risk reduction and the share of people … 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