drugs originally designed to treat diabetes, have taken the world by storm with their use and weight loss and obesity treatment.

But did you know they might be useful for a lot of other stuff, too? That's the topic of this week's Healthcare Triage.

A recently published paper in Nature Medicine aimed to systematically evaluate the benefits and risks for patients taking GLP -1 receptor agonist drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro To do this, they used data from a large Veterans Affairs database examining outcomes from over 200,000 people with diabetes who began taking these types of drugs against data from a large comparison group who either initiated other drugs or did not initiate any new drugs. This is what we might call a discovery approach. And because you've known me to criticize this approach in videos on nutrition research, I want to take a moment here to emphasize that discovery research isn't bad.

What do I mean by discovery research? This is when we use data to get an idea of where we stand on an overarching question. There is no specific hypothesis, just a broad comparison of outcomes between groups.

I do stand by my claim that this approach can't tell us anything definitive. What it can do is identify areas of potential interest so that we can narrow our research down and start conducting more hypothesis driven research to answer questions. The problem with this approach in nutrition research is that we have conducted more discovery research than we'll ever need.

We should have moved past this by now in nutrition. However, the benefits and risks of using drugs like Ozempic for weight loss is new and largely unknown territory, which makes discovery research essential to our eventual understanding of the larger picture. So that being said, this is one of the first studies to map out the bigger picture of specific weight loss drugs and their associated health outcomes.

We can use these data to zero in on specific concerns and or knowledge gaps, which is really great. So to the research, I've already explained the groups being compared. So what did the researchers find?

As expected, significant weight loss was observed in the GLP-1 drug groups. This was accompanied by gastrointestinal issues, which is a known side effect of this class of drugs. Interestingly, and supportive of some previously noted trends like reductions related to these drugs, the risk of substance abuse is also reduced.

This is consistent with data suggesting that these drugs have an effect on a broad range of consumption behaviors. The data also suggests decreases in suicide, schizophrenia, and even infection and disorders related to the brain, heart and lungs. On the risk side, data suggest a significant increase in things like low blood pressure, bone pain problems, kidney stones, and headaches.

On the whole, these issues are preferable to the ones being reduced like stroke. But understanding that these are potential risks is extremely useful not only for patient education, but for our ability to try and address the risks while keeping patients on the medication. Of note, a lot of patients have been taking these drugs for diabetes for a long time, and the health risks have not raised alarm bells so far.

So this is pretty good news in the sense that data suggests the benefits are outweighing the risks, and in the sense that we are establishing a solid framework for further study. The million dollar question or $100 billion question, if you believe the sales predictions, is what these drugs are doing in the brain to affect behaviors like consumption of food and other substances, they have so far been able to affect behavioral change in a way that we have been failing to understand. Despite our best attempts for years, understanding how they do what they do could be an enormous medical breakthrough.

Hey, did you enjoy this episode? You might enjoy this previous episode about other benefits of GLP-1 drugs. We'd like it if you'd like the video, subscribe to the channel down below.

Maybe go on to Patreon.com/healthcaretriage where you can help support the show. Make it bigger and better. We'd especially like to thank our research associates Edward Liljeholm, Joshua Crow, and of course, our surgeon, Admiral Sam.