Doctors Explore How to Keep Weight Off After GLP-1 Drug Treatment
Zepbound and Wegovy can produce profound weight loss, but what happens after that?
A pharmacist holds a box of Novo Nordisk A/S Wegovy brand semaglutide medication.
Photographer: George Frey/BloombergHi, it’s Bob in sunny Berkeley, California. Drugs like Zepbound and Wegovy can produce impressive weight loss over a year of treatment. Now the question is how to best maintain those results. But first...
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week shows that when people lost weight on Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and then switched to a placebo after eight months of treatment, they gradually regained about half of the weight.
By comparison, people who stayed on the drug were an average of 25% lighter at the end of the 88-week study. Even patients who switched to a placebo still weighed about 10% less at the end of the study, and their waist size shrank — indicating that some benefits from the therapy were retained.