The European Association for the Study of Obesity has published a position statement whose argument is not about whether incretin drugs work. It treats that as settled. The argument is that everything around the prescription has failed to keep pace: patient selection, monitoring, clinician training and access have all moved more slowly than the drugs, … Read more
A meta-analysis of 32 randomised trials covering 40,408 people puts the average weight loss on GLP-1 and dual-agonist drugs at 9.36%. Most of the paper is about why that average hides so much. Trials enrolling people who also had type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnoea or fatty liver disease reported systematically smaller losses. Trials that … Read more
For most of the time this site has covered semaglutide, the scarring form of fatty liver disease had no approved drug treatment at all. That has changed. An international expert panel writing in Gut on 11 September 2026 has published a clinical practice update for the two therapies now conditionally approved by the FDA for … Read more
A meta-analysis of 60 studies and more than 1.25 million people, published in Drugs on 12 September 2026, gives the fullest picture yet of what GLP-1 drugs do to muscle, bone and joints. The bone finding is reassuring: no measurable effect on bone mineral density, and none on fractures. The muscle finding is the one … Read more
Between a quarter and a third of people who have bariatric surgery regain a significant amount of weight within two to five years, according to the figures cited by the authors of a new review. Their meta-analysis, published in Frontiers in Endocrinology, pulls together what is known about treating that regain with a GLP-1 drug … Read more
A network meta-analysis of 378 randomised trials covering 113,122 adults with prediabetes has ranked what actually prevents type 2 diabetes, and incretin drugs finished first: dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonists cut the risk of developing diabetes by around 90% against control, and single GLP-1 receptor agonists by around 74%. Metformin plus intensive lifestyle change came third. … Read more
Eighty per cent of adolescents taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist still had solid food in the stomach when they arrived for a procedure, despite having fasted for a median of 13 hours, well beyond the eight hours standard guidelines ask for. Among healthy adolescents fasting under the same instruction, the figure was 5%. The study, … Read more
Novo Nordisk reported on 7 September that 40.4% of children aged 6 to under 12 who took once-weekly semaglutide in its STEP Young trial were no longer classified as having obesity after 68 weeks, compared with none of the children given placebo. Every child in both arms also followed a reduced-calorie diet and an exercise … Read more