July 11, 2024 – The allure of weight loss drugs appears to wane quickly, with more than 80% of users quitting within 2 years.
A new analysis of insurance claims data showed that 85% of people who newly started taking drugs like Ozempic were no longer taking them 2 years later, and 71% of people stopped taking them within 1 year.
The research was conducted by employees of Magellan Rx Management and its parent company, Prime Therapeutics, both of which are pharmacy benefit management companies based in Minnesota. Researchers analyzed claims for 3,364 people who started taking any of a number of drugs from a class known as GLP-1 agonists, which includes Ozempic. The average age of the people was 46.5, and 81% were women.
After one year, 29% of the people were still taking the medicines, and after 2 years, just under 15% were still on them.
All of the people in the study were overweight or had obesity and started taking the drugs in 2021. The study relied heavily on data for off-label usage since the researchers excluded people who had diabetes (some GLP-1s were only FDA-approved for use in 2021 by people with diabetes). Since then, many of the same drugs have been approved exclusively for weight loss. Later in 2021, a version of Ozempic was FDA-approved for people without diabetes and is marketed under the brand name Wegovy.
The researchers reported that 24% of people in their study took Wegovy and 22% of people took Ozempic, and the users of those two drugs were the most likely to stay on the medicines the entire 2 years. About 1 in 4 people taking Ozempic or Wegovy kept taking them for that same amount of time.
Of the people in the study, 26% switched drugs during the 2-year study period. Other drugs used by people in the study included Saxenda and Victoza, which don’t have the same effectiveness as newer drugs but are sometimes required by insurance plans to be tried before coverage will be approved for other treatments.
The maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, Novo Nordisk, said this new analysis has important limitations and told the news agency Reuters in a statement that it "does not believe these data are sufficient to draw conclusions about overall patient adherence and persistence to various GLP-1 medicines, including our treatments."
The researchers wrote that the high rate of discontinuing use of the drugs was concerning.
“The value of GLP-1 products is unlikely to be obtained if they are discontinued in the first two years of therapy. These poor GLP-1 obesity treatment findings highlight the potential for substantial GLP-1 therapy investment waste, the importance of developing obesity care management programs to improve therapy adherence, as well as obtaining value-based contracts from pharmaceutical manufacturers,” the report authors wrote.
GLP-1s work by mimicking hormone processes in the body that result in feeling full, but the medicines have also been linked to many side effects including stomach issues. Given by injection, they are also expensive and have sometimes been in short supply. Clinical trials have shown some people could lose more than 20% of their body weight, although less was more typical.
Discontinuing use of the drugs has been widely documented even in clinical trials, which clinical trial researchers often reported was due to side effects. This latest analysis did not provide information on why people quit using the drugs.
Other analyses have shown that after people stop usage, weight regain is common. One study by Novo Nordisk showed that people who took Wegovy for 1 year and about 4 months lost on average 17% of their body weight, but they stopped the treatment at that point as part of the research design and then regained two-thirds of the weight within the next year.
