Obesity is an important issue in our society, with over a quarter of adults in the UK being obese. There are many reasons why this is a growing problem: high-calorie processed food is cheap, readily available and heavily advertised. Many people work jobs where they sit a desk all day and there is a growing reliance on cars for transportation. Obesity is associated with many heath conditions including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease and can contribute towards fatigue, joint and back pain, low self-esteem, reduced fertility, and increased risk of stroke, bowel cancer, and breast cancer. For these reasons, obesity reduces a person’s life expectancy for an average of 3 to 10 years.
It is recommended for people who are overweight to improve their diet and do more exercise. For example the chief medical officer recommends that doing 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, which may include brisk walking, cycling, swimming, and dancing. However, if someone has difficulty losing weight with these methods; they may be referred by the NHS to a local weight loss group or an active health team which runs exercise sessions with a qualified instructor. Bariatric surgery describes a group of surgeries that make the stomach smaller so someone, feels full more quickly and will eat less food. Such surgeries are available on the NHS to those who are severely overweight but have not been able to lose weight simply with an improved diet and more exercise.
Ozempic is drug that has been developed in recent years, by Danish company Novo Nordisk. This drug is administered as an injection once a week into the arm, stomach or thigh. It is approved to treat type 2 diabetes (a long-term condition where the concentration of glucose in the blood is too high often due to lifestyle factors). Ozempic helps manage type 2 diabetes in 3 main ways: suppressing the amount of glucose released by the liver; stimulating the production of incretins, which help the body the produce more insulin, which in turn signals that more glucose should be stored in the liver and imitating a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, which is naturally released from the intestines and signals that the person is full and so food is emptied from the stomach more slowly. Therefore the person eats less food and less glucose enters the bloodstream. Hence, Ozempic lowers the risk of stroke and heart attack in patients with type 2 diabetes.
Since Ozempic causes someone to feel full and often, as a side effect, nauseas, they will be less inclined to eat and will then lose weight. A study showed that over 40 weeks patients were able to lose an average of 12lb. Off the label prescriptions, meaning unapproved use of the drug, including buying the drug online and doctors prescribing the drug to help patients lose weight (only around half of people prescribed Ozempic in the US have a history of type 2 diabetes) caused sales of Ozempic to soar such that 9 million prescriptions of Ozempic were written in the last 3 months of 2022 in the US. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, those who order online may not know how to correctly administer the drug or may take an incorrect dose, which can be extremely dangerous. Additionally, the high number of people taking this drug has caused a global shortage, meaning that some people with type 2 diabetes have not been able to access it.
Despite the fact that people do loose weight when taking this Ozempic, when they eventually have to stop taking it, in the majority of cases, they put all the weight back on. Weight loss drugs may work in the short term, but they fail to fundamentally change people’s habits surrounding food and exercise. For these reasons, weight loss drugs shouldn’t be used in isolation as a quick and easy way to lose weight but perhaps as part of a larger solution to address the growing challenge of obesity.
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