Thursday 20 October 2022 10:58 PM Leading experts recomend drugs like Wegovy trends now
Four weight-loss drugs that cut bodyweight by up to 10 per cent in a year were recommended for moderately overweight and obese adults who did not have luck with diet and exercise changes by a leading panel of doctors.
Doctors at the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) — a top group of clinicians — are now recommending Wegovy, Saxenda, Qsymia and Contrave for the patients.
The treatments are administered either as injections — from daily to weekly — or as pills to be taken once a day or twice with meals.
They work by suppressing patients' appetite to help curb bad eating habits, leading them to start to shed the extra pounds. The panel said they should be used only when other 'lifestyle' strategies had failed.
Today's recommendation not only boosts the likelihood of them being prescribed by doctors, but also of insurance companies covering prescriptions written for patients.
It is the first time these drugs have been recommended for weight loss by the organization. Each are already approved for weight loss by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Guidelines from the group including obesity experts came into effect today, with doctors now recommended to prescribe the drugs in situations where other lifestyle interventions have failed.
America has declared war on obesity with two in five adults in the country already considered obese, marking a surge of a quarter within a decade.
President Joe Biden has already laid out plans to mark America's favorite foods with traffic light nutrition labels warning of their high fat and sugar content, and to tighten rules on which foods can claim to be 'healthy'.+
In its recommendation, published Thursday, the AGA said the medications should be offered after other lifestyle interventions — such as low-calorie diets and exercise — had not led to significant weight loss.
They said they should be offered to adults with a body mass index (BMI) above 30kg/m2 — classifying them as obese.
But they said it should also be offered to adults with a BMI above 27kg/m2 — or moderately overweight — who also have a weight-related condition such as high blood pressure or heart disease.
The recommendation is for adults only, those over 18 years old, and does not include children.
The panel did not say how long patients should have tried lifestyle interventions before opting to use the drugs.
Lead author Dr Eduardo Grunvald, an obesity expert at the University of California, San Diego, said the recommendation was needed because lifestyle interventions alone do not
