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    How Much Should Weight Loss Drugs Like Wegovy and Zepbound Cost?

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    A new study found that fair prices for medications like Wegovy and Zepbound would be hundreds less per month than they are now.It’s easy to make a medical case for blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives.But for the employers and government programs being asked to pay for the medications, the financial case for them is less clear. Are the drugs’ benefits worth their enormous cost?The answer right now is no, according to a new study published on Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, by researchers at the University of Chicago.To be considered cost effective by a common measure used by health economists, the price of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy would need to be cut by over 80 percent, to $127 per month, the researchers concluded. And Eli Lilly’s Zepbound would be cost effective only if its price fell by nearly a third, to $361 per month. (Zepbound warranted a higher price, the researchers said, because it produced greater benefits in clinical trials.)“There’s no doubt that the drugs are demonstrating tremendous health benefits,” said David Kim, a health economist at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which was funded by government grants. “The problem is the price is too high.”There’s widespread hope that the drugs will effectively pay for themselves in the long run, by making patients healthier and preventing expensive medical bills. It’s not clear yet whether that will turn out to be true.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The New York Times Presents: ‘Weight of the World’ on Ozempic’s Rise

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      ‘Weight of the World’Producer/Director Esther Dere and Nicole RittenmeyerCo-Producer Leah VarjacquesProducer/Reporter Dani BlumProducer Rachel AbramsWatch our new documentary on FX and Hulu starting Friday, Nov. 22, at 10 p.m. Eastern.The ascent of GLP-1 medications, such as Ozempic, has brought about a transformation within the weight-loss industry and beyond, reshaping societal views on health and body image. Originally developed to manage diabetes, these drugs have become associated with rapid weight reduction, capturing public interest thanks to rumored endorsements from high-profile figures like Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk.“Weight of the World” dives into this pivotal moment, following the journeys of three individuals as they navigate the complexities of using GLP-1 medications. The film examines their experiences against the backdrop of over 40 years of diet culture in America, prompting an inquiry into whether these medications represent a groundbreaking shift or merely another chapter in the long and complicated narrative of weight loss.Through expert commentary from medical professionals, dietitians and cultural critics, the film looks at this evolving landscape, and it investigates the societal obsession with thinness and the implications of these new pharmaceutical interventions, raising questions about body image, health and the ongoing struggle against obesity.Left Right Productions/The New York Times/Hulu Originals/FX Networks”GLP-1s are a blockbuster because they promise to solve a social problem without changing anything else.”Tressie McMillan Cottom, Times Opinion columnistLeft Right Productions/The New York Times/Hulu Originals/FX Networks“Thinking about weight is probably the No. 1 item that’s on my mind most of the time. Like, I’m always comparing myself to everyone around me.”Jeffrey Luxmore, a subject featured in the filmSupervising Producer Liz HodesDirector Of Photography Victor Tadashi SuarezVideo Editor Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More

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      Trump prometió hacer público su historial médico pero sigue sin hacerlo

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      Si vuelve a ser elegido, se convertirá en el presidente de mayor edad al final de su mandato. Sin embargo, se niega a revelar incluso la información médica básica.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Como candidato presidencial en 2015, Donald Trump se negó a publicar su historial médico, ofreciendo en su lugar una carta de cuatro párrafos de su médico personal en la que proclamaba que sería “la persona más sana jamás elegida para la presidencia”.En 2020, cuando estuvo hospitalizado por COVID-19 y se presentaba a la reelección, los médicos de Trump dieron una información mínima sobre su estado, que, según se supo más tarde, fue mucho más grave de lo que dejó entrever las descripciones públicas.En 2024, días antes de convertirse en el candidato presidencial republicano oficial por tercera vez, fue rozado por una bala de un posible asesino, pero su campaña no celebró una sesión informativa sobre su estado, no publicó los registros hospitalarios ni puso a disposición a los médicos de urgencias que lo trataron para ser entrevistados.Ahora, a poco más de un mes de unas elecciones que podrían convertir a Trump, de 78 años, en la persona de mayor edad en ocupar la presidencia (82 años, 7 meses y 6 días cuando su mandato termine en enero de 2029), se niega a revelar incluso la información más básica sobre su salud.Si gana, Trump podría entrar en el Despacho Oval con una serie de problemas potencialmente preocupantes, según los expertos médicos: factores de riesgo cardíaco, posibles secuelas del intento de asesinato de julio y el deterioro cognitivo que se produce de forma natural con la edad, entre otros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Time to Say Goodbye to the B.M.I.?

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      The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.Move over, body mass index. Make room for roundness — to be precise, the body roundness index.The body mass index, or B.M.I., is a ratio of height to weight that has long been used as a medical screening tool. It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.The classifications have been questioned by athletes like the American Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, whose B.M.I. of 30 technically puts her on the cusp of obesity. “But alas,” she said on Instagram, addressing online trolls who tried to shame her about her weight, “I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”Advocates for overweight individuals and people of color note that the formula was developed nearly 200 years ago and based exclusively on data from men, most of them white, and that it was never intended for medical screening. Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”So welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Have Healthy Brain Habits? Take This Quiz to Find Out.

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      What can I do to take good care of my brain and lower my risk for a neurological disease? That’s the No. 1 question neurologist Dr. Jonathan Rosand hears from his patients (and their family members) at the Massachusetts General Hospital McCance Center for Brain Health. To help answer it, he and his colleagues, with […] More

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      Compounded Semaglutide: What to Know About Overdose Risks of Ozempic Alternative

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      Some patients say it’s easy to get the do-it-yourself doses of compounded semaglutide wrong.Three hours after Becky Cheairs injected herself with the first dose of compounded semaglutide, she started to vomit. Crouched over the toilet, reeling from nausea, she thought there was no way she would make it on the R.V. trip from Arkansas to San Antonio she had planned that weekend.She was right: She spent the next day throwing up at least once an hour.Like many others, Ms. Cheairs, 66, had taken the drug to lose weight. But she hadn’t taken the brand-name products Ozempic or Wegovy, which come in pens pre-filled with a specific dose. Instead, the medication she was prescribed through a telehealth service came with a vial and a bag of syringes to draw the drug out herself.Ms. Cheairs’ husband asked how much she had taken, then read the instructions. He was shocked: Ms. Cheairs had accidentally given herself five times the amount she was supposed to take.Accidents like this are becoming more common. There have been 159 calls to national poison control centers so far this year involving compounded GLP-1s, the class of medications that includes semaglutide. In 2023, there were only 32.The vast majority of these calls are from people who took too much medication, said Kait Brown, the clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers. The problem has become so concerning that the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning last month about people overdosing on compounded semaglutide. Some patients have been hospitalized, developed pancreatitis or gallstones, or have fainted or become dehydrated. Some patients had taken 10 or even 20 times more than the intended dose.The demand for Ozempic and similar drugs has pushed compounded medications, once a somewhat niche corner of health care, into the mainstream. There isn’t solid data on how many people take compounded GLP-1s. But some estimates have suggested millions of Americans may be seeking them out, often, because they are looking for a cheaper option or can’t find the brand-name drug in stock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Some States Say They Can’t Afford Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs

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      Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Your Body and Mind Change in Midlife

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      Midlife, typically defined as ages 40 to 60, is an inflection point. It’s a time when our past behaviors begin to catch up with us and we start to notice our bodies and minds aging — sometimes in frustrating or disconcerting ways. But it’s also an opportunity: What our older years will look and feel […] More

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      TikTok Attempts to Rein In Diet and Weight Loss Content

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      The company said it will work to remove content about drugs like Ozempic, extended fasting and more from the “For You” feed.Emma Lembke did not know what an algorithm was when she started using social media.The then-12-year-old was thrilled when her parents gave her permission to join Instagram. She quickly followed all kinds of accounts — from Kim Kardashian to Olive Garden, she said — and was soon spending five to six hours a day on the app. Then one day she searched for “ab workouts,” and her feed shifted. She started seeing 200-calorie recipes, pro-anorexia posts and exercise routines that “no 12-year-old should be doing in their bedroom,” she said.Ms. Lembke, now 21, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2023 about how social media led her to disordered eating, and what she and other advocates see as a dire need for stronger regulation to protect social media’s youngest users.Social media platforms have promised to take more action. On Friday, TikTok enacted what some experts called one of the most well-defined policies by a social media company yet on weight and dieting posts. The company’s updated guidelines, which come as TikTok faces a potential ban in the United States, include new guardrails on posts that show “potentially harmful weight management behaviors” and excessive exercise.TikTok said it will work to ensure the “For You” page, which serves as the main content feed on TikTok and is driven by an algorithm that caters to a user’s interests, no longer shows videos that promote “extended intermittent fasting,” exercises designed for “rapid and significant weight loss” or medications or supplements that promote muscle gain. The new regulations also aim to crack down on posts from influencers and other users promoting products used for weight loss or to suppress appetite, such as drugs like Ozempic. They also aim to curb content promoting anabolic steroid use.Under the new policy, machine learning models will attempt to flag and remove content that is considered potentially dangerous; a human moderation team will then review those posts to see if they need to remain off the For You feed, should be removed from age-restricted feeds or should be removed from the platform altogether, said Tara Wadhwa, TikTok’s director of policy in the United States.The elimination of problematic TikToks from the main feed is meant in part to “interrupt repetitive content patterns,” the new guidelines said. Ms. Wadhwa said the company wants to ensure users aren’t exposed to diet and weight loss content “in sequential order, or repeatedly over and over again.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More