alt Hacker NewsSure. But what's the proposed mechanism? For many - not all, obviously - medications, we have an understanding of potential long term risks. Animal studies catch some of them, others we know are potentially risky even without animal studies, e.g. drugs that increase angiogenesis have a risk of increasing tumor growth.
But no one has proposed mechanisms for GLP1 peptides.
Meanwhile, we know obesity is one of the largest long term risks to health in existence, and one of the most prevalent.
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One obvious risk would be blunting of longer term GLP-1 receptor activation. Imagine type 2 diabetes but for ghrelin.
To use an analogy amphetamines have a honeymoon period, and it feels like a lot of people on these weight loss drugs haven’t been on them long enough to get past the honeymoon period and see what the effects are after 10, 20, etc years
Loss of muscle mass. Most folks on these drugs don't lose fat only, but a disproportionate amount of muscle too
> But no one has proposed mechanisms for GLP1 peptides.
I'm worried about long term malnutrition leading to significant loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, and other deficiencies that eventually lead to infirmity and brings forward the immobility death spiral much earlier in late age through weak muscles and bones. Most of the long term studies on GLP-1 agonists that I've reviewed have been on diabetic patients who already had to carefully control their diets and we still don't know what decades of poor diet on Ozempic will do.
For very obese people the tradeoff is still pretty damn good though.