United States: A new study reported the rate of obesity in America fell for the first time in the previous 10 years due to the GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.
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It turned out that obesity levels, which have been growing for many years, decreased for the first time – from 46.2 percent in 2021 to 45.6 percent in 2023 – in 16.8 million adults across the United States, as surveyed by researchers from Harvard University.
Overweight was classified using body mass index (BMI), which has a range of 25 to 30, and obesity was any BMI of 30 or over.
Meanwhile, prescription rates for GLP-1 drugs, such as Wegovy and Zepbound, have risen, although the authors could not definitively establish a link between the two tendencies, US News reported.
What more are the experts stating?
The researchers note that “The most notable decrease [in obesity] was in the South, which had the highest observed…dispensing rate” for GLP-1 medications.
The study was authored by Benjamin Rader, an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, and was published on Dec. 13 in the JAMA Health Forum.
“The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. has increased for several decades. Some long-term forecasts estimate that this upward trajectory will continue, while others forecast a plateau,” Rader’s team added.
Nonetheless, the entry of GLP-1 meds, for example, semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound), has emerged to be a perhaps unexpected new element of the market within the past few years, US News reported.
The injected medications have been selling like hotcakes, and the outcomes in terms of weight loss have been striking more often than not.
The drugs act as a copy of a hormone present in the intestine that, amongst other roles, aids people to feel satiated.
The new study followed health insurance records from 2013 to 2023 from nearly 17 million adults, mainly between 26 and 75 years.
These metrics involved near to 48 million BMI assessments, plus minor BMI-GLP-1 medication usage of the participants. The data contained nearly 48m BMI assessments, while 125,208 participants were also followed for any GLP-1 treatment.
But then, in 2023, the population’s average BMI lowered to 30.21 – the first time it has gone down in the last 10 years, as estimated by Rader’s team.
It’s shocking to note that the percentage of Americans who were obese also decreased slightly in that same year.