site banner

Eli Lilly releases data for a new weight-loss drug to tackle obesity : Shots - Health News : NPR

npr.org

This drug is a true gamechanger

In the SURMOUNT-1 study, people who took the highest dose of tirzepatide, most of whom had a BMI of about 30 or higher but did not have diabetes, lost about 21% of their body weight during the 72 week study. As researchers point out, for people who have bariatric surgery, typical weight loss is about 25% to 30% of their weight, one or two years after the surgery. In the tirzepatide study, 36% of people taking the highest dose lost 25% or more of their body weight.

this is comparable to bariatric surgery

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As NPR has reported, when patients can't afford to stay on obesity medications, they are likely to gain much of the weight back.

If I were Eli Lilly and Company, I would invest into food science, trying to make as many different hyperpalatable foods aimed at teenagers and young adults as possible. The more people have BMI of 30 by the time they are 30, the bigger the market for their drug is. Imagine the government first handing out food stamps to poor Americans, then paying for their obesity treatment via Medicaid.

I'd guess that if the drugs are really effective and the collective societal BMI starts going down, it eventually creates a feedback cycle where obesity generally becomes less and less acceptable and thus there's going to be less people having BMI 30 by 30.

i doubt it. type 2 diabetes can be attenuated with diet modification yet society tolerates it. Down Syndrome is tolerated even though it can be prevented with prenatal screening.

Neither of those is a particularly good comparison. Down Syndrome is not something you can "fix" anyway, there's never going to be a miracle drug for it. Type 2 diabetes is not immediately visible (conditions like obesity that are visible make it more likely, but being obese does not guarantee you have diabetes and having diabetes does not necessarily mean you are obese).

What I mean here is that I suspect that simply having more obese people all around us has made us more tolerant of obesity in general (personally or in others) than we would be otherwise, or society would have been some decades past when obesity was less common, and having actually effective weight loss drugs available would then mean less obese people around us and the pre-00s greater-than-current disdain for obese persons returning.

I don't think this will change anything. Trans people, for example, are just 1% of population yet trans rights/inclusion has exploded