Article: Exclusive: Most patients using weight-loss drugs like Wegovy stop within a year, data show - Reuters, 11 July 2023 Wayback Link
Some lede and pullquotes for basic facts just in case you hit a paywall:
Only about one-third of patients prescribed a popular weight-loss drug like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy were still taking it a year later [...]
The analysis by [...] reviewed pharmacy and medical claims data for 4,255 people with commercial health plans. They had all received new prescriptions of the drugs from a class known as GLP-1 agonists between January and December 2021, and had a diagnosis of obesity, prediabetes or a body mass index of 30 or higher.
Overall, 32% of the patients were still taking the medicine for weight loss a year after their initial prescription [...] and the results did not differ materially based which of the drugs was prescribed
Patrick Gleason [...] a co-author of the analysis, said this real-world data suggests a substantial drop in adherence compared to what was reported in clinical trials. In trials with adults, Novo found that 6.8% of patients taking Wegovy discontinued treatment due to gastrointestinal problems and other adverse events.
Prime did not ask patients why their prescriptions stopped. [...] All the patients had insurance coverage for GLP-1 drugs.
This article is very interesting to me and prompts the question, why are people stopping? Were you prescribed one of these drugs, did you stop taking it?