For the first time since 2014, a new obesity medication has hit the market, offering hope to the 78 million Americans who face the many risks of excess weight: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and complications from COVID-19, among others.
And the new medication — semaglutide, also known as Wegovy — is significantly more powerful than its predecessors, according to research that helped it garner approval from the FDA in June.
“We’ve seen 1½ to 2 times the amount of weight loss compared to other medications,” says Robert Kushner, MD, a researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who has led semaglutide studies. “That’s a leapfrog advance.”
In fact, semaglutide recipients lost nearly 15% of their body weight on average — compared with 2.4% among controls, according to one study of nearly 2,000 patients.
Semaglutide — an injectable medication — is not entirely new. A synthetic version of a natural hormone that quells appetite, it’s already used to treat Type 2 diabetes. But the obesity trials, paid for by pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, used a much higher dose.
High doses haven’t been studied long enough to identify long-term side effects, notes Kushner, a paid consultant to Novo Nordisk. But the recent research reported mild-to-moderate gastrointestinal issues that lessened over time.
Now Kushner hopes semaglutide will help spark interest in obesity medications.
“Over 40% of U.S. adults have obesity, and the number who are getting a pharmacologic treatment is under 3%,” he says. “Part of the challenge is educating primary care providers that providing evidence-based obesity care includes consideration of medication.”
