Ep. 39 - GLP-1 Prescriptions Without Obesity or Diabetes

So New York Times article is written by an author named Danny Bloom.

New large studies confirming what many people have long suspected, that a sizable number of people taking these drugs don't have a medical reason to do so.

The study analyzed medical records of more than 92 million U.S. adults and identified more than 1.1 million who were taking GLP-1s.

It did not have a record of any issue that would make them eligible, like diabetes or obesity, obesity as a BMI of over 30, for example.

The researchers actually in this article, it says, you know, didn't go on to actually examine why people took the meds.

You know, probably they were just taking it to, you know, lose a little bit of weight for events or just generally to help their wellness and that there are other potential benefits that have not yet been scientifically corroborated in well... you know, kind of designed peer-reviewed studies, but there's a lot of interest in the potential other use cases for GLP-1s like curbing smoking addiction, alcoholism, gambling addiction, sex addiction, and other compulsions, as well as the salient benefits that are already being seen for things like heart disease risk, stroke risk, and so on.

So the article The lead author is Dr. Babak Arandi, who's an obesity medicine specialist and transplant surgeon, another transplant surgeon in the same department as my colleague, Dr. Segev at NYU.

And Dr. Arandi is the lead author of the study.

And basically says that a lot of people have good publicity with their experience and word of mouth, and then other people kind of glom onto that and say, okay, well, this worked out for this friend of mine or this celebrity, maybe it'll work for me too.

um and uh The article does cite that, of course, these GLP-1s today are approved for a limited number of medical conditions that have diagnoses like obesity with a BMI over 30, diabetes.

The FDA has approved some GLP-1s for prophylaxis against heart attacks and cardiovascular issues and sleep apnea.

But you also have to have obesity to technically qualify for on-label use.

And then chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetics as well.

So the article talks about how this has become a big cultural phenomenon.

And then there's a lot of aggressive marketing of this.

And it's a unique thing because normally you don't think of the lay public having such a broad knowledge of medications, of their side effects.

I hear from colleagues.

We have a friend who was telling me that he's getting his Reta TrueTide from somebody who imports it from you know, overseas and it's kind of this gray market or really black market.

And, you know, he was telling me he was asking me my thoughts about read a true tide as a drug.

And it was like, I'm not asking you to get it for me.

I have a source.

And this is almost this you know, a little bit odd because, you know, you're kind of like how above board is all of this, even though these medications are excellent and well-studied and there's great data that's coming out and FDA approval for widespread use of reticutide is I'm sure imminent, but you know, technically that's kind of not only off-label, it's not actually an approved drug yet.

So yet people know about it.

People know about the side effects of semaglutide and trisepatide, which are the active ingredients in the FDA-approved medications.

And, you know, people talk about microdosing, and they use terms that nobody was using a few years ago, certainly not – people who were not in healthcare, not providers, not fairly sophisticated with medical jargon.