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Comment by smabie | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately now weight loss is basically solved due to ozempic and friends. Suspect a very large % of the population will be on these things indefinitely

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https://www.drugs.com/ozempic.html says

> after 30 weeks, patients on Ozempic 0.5mg had lost 2.6 kg more than the placebo group, and patients on Ozempic 1mg lost 3.5 kg more than the placebo group.

That doesn't seem all that much weight loss to me, and it sounds far from being "basically solved".

Also, financing the drug seems to be an unsolved problem, except for the rich.

I am on Mounjaro 10 mg for the past 3 months. I have lost 20 pounds. So far so good, looking to loose more but I seem to have plateaued right now I have not lost any additional weight in the last month... would like to get to 170 which would be another 30 pounds. Luckily my wife works for a hospital and has excellent insurance which covers it. Most people have to pay equivalent to an expensive car payment for it.

Sounds like very low dosages; for comparison:

https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.147...

> mean weight loss was 17.3% (SD: 9.3%) with [2.4mg] semaglutide and 2.0% (SD: 6.1%) with placebo

Re financing, they’re incredibly expensive in the US, but in the UK Ozempic ends up being ~£200 a month, and many people seem to find they save that much in food costs. Also this stuff is dead easy to manufacture, every pharma company seems to have their own version in the pipeline, and some of the very first versions (eg liraglutide, from memory) aren’t too far off patent expiry.

I wonder if this might mean that a version 1.x or 2 is somewhere in the pipeline with (eventual) better results to some nth degree. Really hoping we can get some more of these in the US and that the prices will come down as things change.

They very much are! Retatrutide and (semaglutide + cagrilintide) and danuglipron seem to be the ones to watch

Wegovy, the weight loss indication for the same drug as Ozempic, has people titrate up to 2.4 mg/week. Ozempic is generally titrated up to 2 mg/week for T2D. The study you’re looking at used doses lower than is typical today.

> financing the drug seems to be an unsolved problem, except for the rich

Wait a few years for patents to expire (or go grey market with pirated surplus from the factory)

Yeah, those numbers don't account for how much wad more painful for the placebo group

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