Doctors Surprised When Patients Who Start Semaglutide Are Frequently Cured of Other Conditions
Medical practitioners are finding that new weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound are causing other chronic diseases like arthritis to go away on their own, at least for some patients.
As the New York Times reports, one patient who was prescribed Wegovy — its active ingredient, semaglutide, is an agonist for the hormone GLP-1, thought to be involved in regulating appetite — no longer needed additional medication to lower her blood pressure or treat her rheumatoid arthritis.
Another patient who took Zepbound — its active ingredient, tirzepatide, is believed to function similarly — also found her arthritis ameliorated.
"Within a few days, all my joint pain went away," she told the paper.
"We are treating the medical condition of obesity and its related complications at the same time," added internist and obesity medicine specialist Stefie Deeds.
While we're only beginning to understand the side effects, both positive and negative, of taking increasingly popular GLP-1 agonist drugs like Eli Lilly's Zepbound and Novo Nordisk's Wegovy, practitioners are seeing some fascinating secondary benefits.
But treating obesity first, instead of focusing on related conditions like high blood sugar and pressure, is proving controversial among experts.
One Seattle-based doctor, named Scott Hagan, told the NYT that he only discusses the option of weight loss drugs once other conditions show no signs of improvement.
And the science still isn't entirely clear if there is a causal link between taking weight loss drugs and the subsequent improvement of related conditions, as the newspaper points out.
Nonetheless, practitioners are hopeful that weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic could have positive knock-on effects. One study found that people taking Ozempic improved kidney function with diabetes and kidney disease. Novo Nordisk also reported that Wegovy led to similar improvements.
Eli Lilly has also claimed that Zepbound can even treat obstructive sleep apnea, a common sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts.
Another study involving 156 people who had been diagnosed with early Parkinson's disease found that a precursor of Ozempic called lixisenatide may slow the progression of the disease.
But whether health practitioners will ever agree on a unified approach regarding weight and health is unclear. Doctors remain torn between starting by tackling obesity or treating obesity-related conditions first.
Given the surging popularity of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, however, this is unlikely to be the last we hear of this debate.
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