Weight is something that I’ve thought about every single day of my adult life,” says Jennifer Blackburn*, a 49-year-old public relations professional in Toronto. Following decades of trying different diets and medications—and finding little success—in fall 2022 she started taking Ozempic, the diabetes drug that has become synonymous with celebrity weight loss.
“It has been life-changing,” she says.
US health-care providers wrote more than nine million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs during the last few months of 2022, around the time Blackburn received her script. Some 890 million adults have obesity worldwide, and weight-loss drug sales are forecast to grow to as much as $100 billion by the end of the decade.
No wonder obesity medications are a hot topic. But there’s still mass confusion around who should take them, whether the potential side effects are worth it, and whether people who truly need them can access—and afford— the limited supply.
How do the new obesity drugs work?
Ozempic was approved by the FDA in 2017 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Once the manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, tapped into the drug’s added benefit of triggering substantial weight loss, it soon had another drug in the works: Wegovy, with a higher dose of the same active ingredient, semaglutide, was approved in 2021 for the treatment of obesity. The company also makes an oral form of semaglutide called Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes.
In addition to semaglutide, there is also tirzepatide, which is prescribed as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. (Again, the active ingredient is the same, but the drugs are prescribed under different names with slightly different doses.) Another diabetes drug, liraglutide, is marketed as Saxenda for weight loss. And dulaglutide is sold as Trulicity for diabetes management.
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