Hitting the market over the past six years, the drugs Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are viewed as a therapeutic breakthrough for the 42% of the U.S. population who are clinically obese. One Seattle endocrinologist suggests, however, that more research is needed.
These drugs are not the be-all and end-all to weight-loss therapy, wrote Dr. Michael Schwartz in a commentary published Oct. 2 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. His co-author was Sophie Yang Gou, a postdoctoral fellow in Schwartz’s lab at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Many experts seem to be saying “OK, we’ve fixed this problem. We’re done,” noted Schwartz, who co-directs the UW Medicine Diabetes Institute. That is simply not the case, he said.
Some patients can’t tolerate these drugs’ side effects, which include nausea, pain, depression and gastrointestinal problems. Perhaps most concerning is that the weight loss induced by these drugs appears to rapidly reverse once they are discontinued. Some patients have reported gaining back more weight than they carried when they started, the authors note.
