Jens Juul Holst, a scientist who helped discover and develop drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, explained why people are unlikely to keep taking their drugs for more than a year or two
A scientist who took part in the pioneering development of glucagon-like Peptide-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy is revealing why many people will likely give up the drugs after just a couple of years.
Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a hormone used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity, as it works in the brain to affect satiety by signaling the pancreas to increase insulin production and make the body feel fuller. efficient at sugar processing.
In recent months, semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has become trending on social media as some people in Hollywood circles have been using it for weight loss, despite not having diabetes or clinical obesity.
In an interview with WiredJens Juul Holst, a scientist who received the Warren Alpert Foundation Award in 2021 for his work in the discovery and development of treatments based on the hormone GLP-1, explained that while the drugs are effective, he thinks it is unlikely that people want to stay on drugs for more than two years.
What happens is that you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating, and so I think there is a price to pay when you do, explained Holst, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. If you like food, that pleasure is gone. Food cravings for some people are eliminated when they take GLP-1 medications.
So you don’t eat while on GLP-1 therapy because you’ve lost interest in food, she continued. Eventually it may be a problem, that once you’ve been at it for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can’t take it anymore and have to go back to your old life.
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Holst added that drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have been on the market since 2005, and studies have shown people don’t take them for a long time.
It’s just like any other drug, they don’t take it for many reasons, she told the outlet, noting that even those who return to drugs after stopping are unlikely to continue taking them. It’s simply because something happens that makes you uninterested in moving forward.
Maybe you think everything is fine now, and then it turns out it’s not fine and maybe you go back to therapy. But I don’t see a huge portion of the population being put on Wegovy and staying on Wegovy for the rest of their lives, I just don’t see that picture, because that hasn’t happened with other GLP-1 drugs, he added.
PEOPLE previously spoke with Ania Jastreboff MD, PhD., an obesity medicine medical scientist at Yale, about Ozempic, Wegovy, and the rebound weight gain that can occur if the drug is stopped.
He explained that those using these drugs must continue taking them if they are to maintain weight loss because diabetes and obesity are chronic conditions.
“If you have a patient who has high blood pressure, he has hypertension, and you start him on an antihypertensive drug and his blood pressure improves, what if you stop that drug? Well, his blood pressure would come back up and we’re not surprised. same with anti-obesity drugs,” Jastreboff said.
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Read the original article in People.
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