nationalgeographic.com
More evidence suggests that medications such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, originally developed for diabetes and then approved for obesity, have benefits that go beyond these conditions. Those include lower risk of 10 cancers, protection against heart and kidney diseases, and reduction in systemic inflammation, according to recently published research.
This drug class, known as GLP-1 agonists, includes semaglutide—approved as Ozempic for type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for obesity—and tirzepatide—approved as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. Some of these protective effects likely result from patients’ weight loss when taking these medications, but the drugs appear to have other effects that improve health independent of the weight loss.
“The cardioprotective effect of semaglutide observed in people with obesity developed within months of drug initiation, well before meaningful weight loss had been achieved in most trial participants” in one 2022 trial, Daniel Drucker, a physician-scientist at the Lunenfield-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, states in a commentary published Thursday in Science. “The initial chapter of GLP-1 innovation focused on glucose control, and later, weight loss,” he writes. “Subsequent waves seem likely to improve health outcomes in people with a range of chronic disorders.”
Indeed, a recent study in JAMA Network Open is the first to suggest that even protection from certain cancers could be among the ways these drugs can help improve health. People with obesity have a higher risk of developing 13 cancers, and the new research found a reduced risk for 10 of these cancers in patients with type 2 diabetes who were prescribed a GLP-1 agonist drug, compared to just insulin.
While the study was large, with more than 1.6 million patients from the United States, it has multiple limitations that warrant “cautious optimism,” says William Murphy, a cancer immunologist at the University of California Davis School of Medicine who studies obesity’s impact.