Real-world data shows that patients who stay on GLP-1 medications are more likely to maintain meaningful weight loss and avoid serious health complications — while those who stop treatment face greater risk.
WeightControl.com Interview with: John Wilding DM FRCP
Professor of Medicine & Honorary Consultant Physician
Department of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine
Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences
Clinical Sciences Centre
Aintree University Hospital
Liverpool, United Kingdom
A large real-world analysis of electronic health records and health claims data in the United States examines what happens to patients prescribed GLP-1 based treatments — and what the consequences are when they stop.
The main takeaway is that your genetics can influence how well these medications work for you and what side effects you might experience.
WeightControl.com Interview with: Dr. Adam Auton, PhD, MSc Lead author and Vice President of Human Genomics 23andMe Research Institute
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: GLP-1 medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide have transformed the treatment of obesity, but there’s enormous variation in how people respond. In clinical trials, some people lose more than 25% of their body weight while others lose almost nothing. Before our study, some of the non-genetic factors that influence response were understood – sex, age, whether someone has type 2 diabetes – but even after accounting for those, there was still a lot of unexplained variation. We suspected genetics might play a role.
Using supermarket purchase data, we found that individuals initiating GLP-1 RA treatment showed small but significant changes in their food purchases.
WeightControl.com Interview with: Kathrine Kold Sørensen, postdoc, PhD, cand.scient.san.publ Copenhagen University Hospital – Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen Department for Clinical and Translational Research Denmark
Kathrine Kold Sørensen, postdoc, PhD.
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: GLP-1 receptor agonists are widely used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity and are known to improve weight and metabolic outcomes. Beyond weight loss, however, the mechanisms underlying these benefits are not fully understood. Smaller studies and case reports have suggested that GLP-1 RAs may influence food preferences.
This shift has happened incredibly fast, and many clinicians may not realize how common postpartum GLP-1 use has already become.
WeightControl.com Interview with:
Mette Bliddal Lektor, ph.d Department of Clinical Research Associate Professor, KI, OUH, Research unit of Gynaecology and Obstetrics University of Southern Denmark
Dr. Bliddal, Ph.D.
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: We began noticing that more new mothers were starting weight-loss medication shortly after giving birth. Once semaglutide was approved for weight loss, the numbers rose fast. That caught our attention, especially because so little is known about using these medications during a time of major physical and hormonal changes, natural weight loss, and breastfeeding, and because the effects on breastfed infants remain unclear. This made it important to understand how common this use has already become.
Since there is a lack of head-to-head trials on these agents, future research should explore their comparative efficacy (e.g. semaglutide vs. tirzepatide vs. retatrutide).
WeightControl.com Interview with:
Areesha Moiz BSc Centre of Clinical Epidemiology, Lady Davis Institute Jewish General Hospital, and Division of Experimental Medicine McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Division of Experimental Medicine McGill University
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: GLP-1 receptor agonists have been used for type 2 diabetes management for almost two decades. Trials conducted in this patient population also showed some weight loss effects, leading to them being investigated in patients with overweight or obesity and without diabetes. With all the recent buzz around Ozempic (semaglutide) these past few years, we were interested in seeing what other agents in this class of drugs were out there, how they performed for weight loss, and how safe they were.
Fhe study found that diet quality could affect pain differently in men and women. Women who consumed a higher quality diet reported lower pain and had better physical function. This effect was less pronounced in men.
WeightControl.com Interview with: Dr. Alison M Hill | PhD, APD, RNutr, MDiet, BAppSci (Human Movement) Hons. Senior Lecturer in Nutrition UniSA: Clinical and Health Sciences Alliance for Research in Exercise, Nutrition and Activity (ARENA) University of South Australia
Dr. Hill
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Chronic pain is a common and disabling health problem, estimated to affect 20-30% of people worldwide. Those who experience chronic pain often have a higher weight compared to the general population. Food choices that influence the overall quality of a person’s diet may contribute to an individual’s pain by affecting their weight or triggering bodily processes such as inflammation.
This study of Australian adults explored whether diet was directly linked to pain, and if factors like weight, or body fat, impacted this relationship. Additionally, the study looked at differences between men and women as chronic pain is more prevalent in women.
Multiple studies now report that the amounts of skeletal muscle loss with these new powerful weight loss agents is quite large, up to 40% of weight loss.
WeightControl.com Interview with:
Steven B. Heymsfield, M.D. Professor and Director of the Body Composition-Metabolism Laboratory Pennington Biomedical Research Center of the Louisiana State University System in Baton Rouge
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The recent introduction of glucagon receptor-1 agonists for weight control opens a new era in obesity pharmacotherapy. The greater weight loss with the new drugs is revealing a long-standing recognition that negative energy balance is accompanied by not only decrements in body fat, but also lean protein-containing tissues such as liver, kidney, and skeletal muscle.
WeightControl.com Interview with: Stéphanie Abo, PhD Applied Mathematics University of Waterloo
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Our study examines how men and women process food differently, particularly how each sex responds to a high-carb versus a high-fat diet. Obesity and related conditions, like type 2 diabetes, are major global issues, and nutrition plays a key role in managing these conditions.
Men and women metabolize fats and carbohydrates differently, especially during fasting and exercise. Using a mathematical model and computer simulations, we investigated sex differences in the processing of glucose and fat and identified candidate pathways behind these sex-specific differences. This research can help improve personalized nutrition and diet strategies for both men and women.
Researchers found that four in 10 patients (40.7%) were persistent with their medication one year after their initial prescription’s fill. The proportion of patients who were persistent with semaglutide was 45.8% versus 35.6% in patients receiving liraglutide.
WeightControl.com Interview with: Hamlet Gasoyan, Ph.D. Lead author of the study and Researcher Center for Value-Based Care Research Cleveland Clinic
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response:Recently, injectable forms of GLP-1 RA medications such as semaglutide have been more commonly prescribed, in part related to their ability to demonstrate clinically significant weight reduction. However, outside of randomized trial settings, data on weight loss with semaglutide or liraglutide for obesity is generally limited to 6 months of follow-up, based on brand names approved by the FDA for type 2 diabetes only, or cohorts that exclude patients who did not persist with the medication.
Because we found that GLP1 drugs can activate a neuron population in the brain to reduce food intake without nausea, the implication is that future obesity drugs could be developed to selectively promote satiety without the negative side effects.
WeightControl.com Interview with:
Amber L. Alhadeff, Ph.D. Principal Investigator Monell Chemical Senses Center & Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
WeightControl.com: What is the background for this study?
Response:GLP1-based weight loss drugs have become extremely popular, but we don’t have a good understanding of how they work. Further, many people who take these drugs experience nausea and other gastrointestinal side effects – some more severe than others.
Because of this, we became interested in understanding whether the appetite loss and weight loss stem from the same or different neural circuits as those that mediate the nausea.
