Even among the insured, weight loss drugs are rarely prescribed, study suggests
Weight loss drugs are difficult to get, even among insured patients who meet the medical criteria food the drug, with a BMI of 30 or more.
Powerful weight loss medications aren’t reaching the people who need them most, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
The barriers to the drugs are many: Getting a prescription; finding a pharmacy with the drug in stock and being able to pay for it.
“Obesity has been a long-standing clinical and public health change and it’s growing in scope,” said Dr. Chiadi Ndumele, director of obesity and cardiometabolic research in the division of cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, who presented the findings Tuesday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“In recent years, we’ve developed increasingly powerful pharmacotherapies, particularly these GLP-1 receptor agonists, that have a fairly profound impact on obesity,” he said, referring to the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound.
“That being said,” Ndumele said, “we still recognize that the uptake of these agents is still fairly limited.”
Rating: 5