July 23, 2024 – GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic were intended to treat diabetes, but their weight loss-inducing effects swiftly caught the nation’s attention. Over the past decade, the proportion of people using them for weight loss has doubled, while the proportion of people taking GLP-1s to treat diabetes is declining.
Those findings, published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, are important because they gauge patterns of how GLP-1s are being used to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes. While the study can’t say how many people in the U.S. are taking the drugs, it does shine light on the health conditions most commonly faced by people taking GLP-1s, as well as which drugs are being used the most.
The drug semaglutide accounted for an estimated 88% of new GLP-1 prescriptions written in 2023 and reviewed by the researchers. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Ozempic, which is approved to treat type 2 diabetes, and the active ingredient in Wegovy, which is approved for weight loss among people with other weight-related health conditions like high blood pressure or heart disease.
For the study, the researchers analyzed health records for about 45 million people from 2011 to 2023 and found more than 870,000 of those people had received a new prescription during that time for a drug from this list of GLP-1s: albiglutide, dulaglutide, exenatide, liraglutide, lixisenatide, and semaglutide.
The proportion of people using GLP-1s shifted from 70% during the period of 2015 to 2018, down to 57% during the period of 2019 to 2023. A line graph published along with study shows the incidence of people newly being prescribed GLP-1s takes a steep upward charge after 2020. Semaglutide was approved by the FDA for weight loss in 2021.
The researchers cautioned that increasing usage of GLP-1s to treat obesity could drive further shortages of the drugs, which have occurred frequently in recent years.
“Further, drug shortages may exacerbate the existing nationwide racial and ethnic disparities in [GLP-1] prescriptions,” they wrote, adding that approvals of new GLP-1s to target heart risk reduction would affect access even more.
“This data suggests that more healthcare providers are seeing the benefits of these medications for treating obesity, which is a significant public health shift,” co-author Yee Hui Yeo, MD, a clinical fellow in the Karsh Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “However, it also raises concerns about potential medication shortages and the need to ensure that patients with diabetes still have access to these treatments.”
The FDA currently lists several dosages of Wegovy as in shortage, but Ozempic is now readily available, the agency’s database shows.
