Is This Drug the Future of Weight Loss?

I know the headline sounds like bad clickbait, but there’s an anti-obesity medication that’s disrupting the industry. According to a recent article from The New York Times, the drug is so effective that obese patients who take it could also prevent other consequences such as diabetes. The drug is semaglutide from Novo Nordisk, and it’s already marketed as a treatment for Type 2 diabetes.

In a clinical trial, subjects who injected it weekly for 68 weeks lost almost 15% of their body weight, compared to just 2.4% in the placebo group. Over a third of patients who received semaglutide lost more than 20% of their body weight, and many patients experienced improved symptoms of diabetes and pre-diabetes. Dr. Robert F. Kushner, an obesity researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and leader of the study said, “The drug is a game-changer. This is the start of a new era of effective treatments for obesity.”