By Madison Muller, Bloomberg News (TNS)
For the primary time in a decade, obesity within the U.S. is falling — and a brand new study suggests it's resulting from wildly popular drugs like Ozempic.
The variety of obese Americans has been rising steadily for years, and the country's average body mass index (BMI) is rising alongside it. But in 2023, something modified: the obesity rate fell to 43.96% from 44.1% the 12 months before. It's a small but significant decline, researchers say. According to the evaluation, the largest change occurred within the south, where the very best concentration of prescriptions for the drugs was recorded.
The findings, published Friday within the JAMA Health Forum, suggest that blockbuster drugs like Novo Nordisk A/S's Ozempic and Wegovy and Eli Lilly & Co.'s Mounjaro and Zepbound may very well be helping to curb America's obesity epidemic.
“We're already seeing the impact in the data,” Benjamin Rader, the computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital who led the study, said in an interview.
Rader and his colleagues analyzed electronic health records and anonymized insurance claims from hundreds of thousands of American adults to trace the prevalence of obesity over the past decade. They used the claims data to map prescriptions for drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro, which belong to a category of medication referred to as GLP-1.
Safe and effective weight-loss drugs have the potential to vary that trajectory, experts said, but their use has been hampered by widespread supply shortages and high prices that hinder access. Despite these challenges, the drugs are beginning to have an effect, Rader said.
“While obesity remains a significant public health problem, the observed declines in obesity prevalence suggest an encouraging reversal of long-term increases in the past,” the researchers wrote.
The drug's impact was most noticeable within the South, where obesity rates fell to 45% from 46% the 12 months before. In this region, a mean of 6% of residents received a prescription for weight reduction and diabetes medications, in comparison with 5.1% within the Midwest, 4.4% within the Northeast and three.4% within the West.
In other regions, obesity rates remained unchanged – apart from the West, where they rose.
The researchers warned that the South was seeing a disproportionate variety of deaths from Covid-19 amongst individuals with obesity, which could have influenced their findings. However, the very best variety of Covid deaths occurred before 2023, so this might not explain the entire decline, they said.
Rader expects obesity-related health problems, comparable to heart problems, to say no as access to medications improves. Currently, fewer than 20 state Medicaid programs cover weight reduction costs. Medicare, the federal government medical health insurance plan for older Americans, doesn’t currently cover weight-loss medications — but a proposal from the Biden administration could soon change that. About 60% of employers have chosen to cover vaccinations for his or her employees.
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