Participants had a body mass index (BMI) of 27 or above and type 2 diabetes. 48% were women and 52% were men. Their average age was 55.
In the 80-week phase 3 trial, 1,152 were randomly assigned to receive a weekly injection of placebo (289), or retatrutide 4 mg (292), 9 mg (284) or 12 mg (287), alongside dietary counselling and guidance on physical activity.
By the end of the study, those on 4mg of retatrutide lost 11.9% of their body weight on average, increasing to 16.8% with 9mg and 18.8% on 12mg. Those in the placebo group lost 5.1%.
Among those on the 12 mg dose, almost half (47%) shed at least 20% of their starting weight and almost a third (31%) lost at least 25%. That compared with 6% and 3%, respectively, with placebo.
Additionally, 72% achieved an HbA1c (measuring average blood sugar levels for the last two to three months) of 6.5% or lower, a standard threshold used to diagnose type 2 diabetes, compared with 29% in the placebo group.
The next one along in the pipeline of weight loss jabs. 25% of body weight is, erm, a lot. What glory in this very dawn etc.
BMI = Bullshit Measuring Indicator
I am the same weight now as I was when I was 30, but I am 1 inch shorter.
When my BMI was in the ‘good’ band, I was at my sickest.
Having said all that, did anyone else see that article abuut the actor John Goodman in the DT ? Lost 14 stone. Took him 10 years, mind.
BMI = Bullshit Measuring Indicator
Indeed. It’s a population level indicator and was never meant to be applied to individuals the way it is by some health professionals and journalists.
Nobody would claim an international rugby player is unfit but most would all be obese on the BMI scale.
So they replaced it with waist-to-height ratio. Great. Gut sucked in, or hanging out? I can make that difference more than 6 inches.
The fascinating one with this one is that it’s been widely available for at least a couple of years from Chinese peptide suppliers, it’s probably the most widely-taken drug that isn’t officially released yet. And I can confirm it works really well.
Anyone buying untested new drugs from ‘Chinese peptide suppliers’ should get a twofer on some psychiatric meds.
Why do you presume Stuart didn’t conduct due diligence?
Does safety only come from government evaluation and control?
There are many thousands of dietary supplements that do NOT have government evaluation and approval. Some, like magnesium glycinate, are critical for old people.
Why do I suppose Stuart didn’t conduct due diligence on Chinese peptide suppliers? Yeah, good one.
Was the NW3 a clue?
I have known some of the fittest men there are be obese by the absurd BMI measure.
As for these jabs, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, ironically.
If you’re northern European you might tend to put on a bit because you are from generations of forebears who faced the cold and starvation, and evolution is real.
Eat less, move more, and you’ll be fine.
People keep saying this but they were not only tested but have been widely used for diabetics for quite some time prior to their use for weight loss.
My sister lost a lot of weight on the jab (can’t remember which one) and has not gone bald or lost all her muscle mass, although she has made the effort to do strength training (which she should be doing anyway).
Judging by the numbers for the trial above, people are not losing 2 stone in a month. 20% of your bodyweight over 80 weeks isn’t radical.
Of course you will put the weight back on if you get on the pies the moment you get off the jab, but that applies to any weight loss regime.
There are a bunch of side effects beyond losing muscle mass. But as with everything not everyone suffers them all. Maybe I should have said there’s no such thing as a guaranteed free lunch. To be fair, exercise carries risk, too.
We’re the Prostate Generation. If you’re on meds for it you can be on Finasteride, Tamsulosin (or equivalent), or both.
Finasteride’s side effects can include suicidal thoughts and permanent willy dysfunction. Fortunately I have none of them.
Tamsulosin’s can include gross low blood pressure, muscle and joint ache, fatigue, snotty nose and temporary willy dysfunction. I get the lot, so only use Tamsulosin when drastically necessary, whilst waiting for the NHS to organise my pull-through.
Yer never know, see.
According to recent research, for every 1000 men treated for prostate cancer (all forms of treatment) it will save 1 life.
As you list Norm, there are some serious side effects with this stuff, and it won’t necessarily make any difference because for most men, it would take them to live to 120+ for prostate cancer to kill them, so most will die with PC rather than from PC.
It seems this is another example of the medical profession treating people with drugs / chem / radio/ surgery because they can, not because they should.
I always put a few kgs on at this time of year even though I try to maintain my diet and fitness regime, I reckon my body just slows down.
I usually lose it again in spring without knowingly making any changes although this year I didn’t. My doc thinks it could be a bit of fluid retention or I’m not being honest with myself, and he’s probably right on the honesty level.
In Summer my weight jumps a few lbs. It is all fluid : my feet and calves swell and I look fatter.
One night at the beginning of August I went to the loo six times in a night. In the morning my weight was back to normal and my legs looked like they belonged to Kate Moss.
my legs looked like they belonged to Kate Moss.
Who, coincidentally, has not been seen in public in six weeks.
Found a book on a train written by a guy called Michael Colgan back around 1992. Loads of interesting stuff, but one thing he said was that if you lose more than about 2 1/4Lb per week your body will go into starvation mode, and if you go back to your normal eating regime you will put back every pound of fat and more.
This was just after Oprah Winfrey had walked on stage with a trolley full of lard, the same amount as she had lost. He said she would put it all back on. And she did.
normal eating regime
Thats the key.
Losing a few pounds is easy, a minor change will bring that about. Not reverting back to old bad habits will stop you regaining it.
Absolutely.
I have asked the question ‘what do you think is going to happen to all those who are currently on Ozempic / Wegovy, et al when they stop taking it and go back to the lifestyle that got them fat in the first place’?
And don’t forget to ask what, if any, side effects of said drugs are they also now going to be living with…….
Pretty sure even the manufacturers say you’ll just stick it all straight back on.
Not sure why every article on weight loss drugs has people trying the “gotcha” of “when you stop taking it”. No one ever says that on a statins article.
You don’t stop taking them, you just titrate down to whatever dose keeps you stable.
It’s not a gotcha at all Stuart, just a genuine question. My mates son has lost a shitload of weight from being on one or other of these drugs, but before he started taking them he was a glutton. Even on the meds, he can still woof down meals far larger than I can (i’m 67 and not obese) so i am interested in what happens next – keep taking the drugs, have you changed your lifestyle forever or do you go back to the habits that got you in trouble in the first place?
Your answer appears to be that you keep taking the drugs forever.
Your eating habits will have changed. Your appetite will have changed. You will have developed a new habit of “No thanks I don’t feel hungry.” I see no horror stories online of “I was on the weight job and got it back double.”
There are hundreds of stories in the media and the studies into the drugs pretty much all talk about this as a significant issue.
I’m not against them, by the way – people can and should take whatever they like. I just think it’s a bit daft, for many people.
Yep, lifestyle change is the only way to lose weight and keep it off, unless you want to spend the rest of your life on a faddy diet or taking jabs.
As said elsewhere: eat less, move more.
Losing a kilo a week is nothing out of the usual. Your body can cope with it easily. Cut out milk and sugar entirely and with no other dietary or exercise changes you will lose a kilo a week for a few months. To keep the weight off you have to change eating habits.
Amusingly 27 of the retatrutide patients suffered cardiac events compared with just 23 in the placebo group. The press release contains no details on whether the events were dose-related (which would tell us whether retatrutide might have been the cause of those events) nor how many resulted in death. But Eli Lilly has promised to reveal those details in a peer-reviewed journal at some point.
There were three times as many people in the (3) Retatrutide groups. So the opposite of the point you are making.
TRIUMPH-3 randomised 1,949 participants in a 1:1:2 ratio to retatrutide 9mg, retatrutide 12mg, or placebo.
That puts about 975 people on retatrutide (both doses combined) and about 975 on placebo.
Unless you’re talking about a different trial?
Not that 27 vs 23 is (I would have thought) statistically significant anyway.
Yes. On its own, 27 vs 23 is not statistically significant, That is why I wanted to know whether there were more events in the 12 mg group than the 9 mg group, because that would be a clue as to whether the drug is responsible for the cardiac events. But Eli Lilly doesn’t seem to be releasing that information yet.
This is an economics blog and we’re all forgetting trade-offs.
The world is increasingly full of fat cunts, and as with the “war on drugs”, the conventional means to address it fail. Why is everyone getting fat? Because they can. They can afford it, and we’ve developed a world of palatable food plenty that is no longer based on human activity. It’s a consequence of affluence. It turns out humans who don’t live in abject poverty tend to get fat.
Fat cunts generally can’t do the work normally-sized people can. They have attenuated lives, require all sorts of clever and expensive support, and come down with metabolic diseases that are likely to kill them relatively young. They end up being a net drain on society’s resources.
Fat jabs appear to be able to ameliorate all that and get people mobile and productive again, at a somewhat increased risk of side-effects including cardiac problems. Trade-offs.
But it seems to me that on a societal level, despite the costs of the jabs, the overall benefits are likely drastically to outweigh the losses. Just so long as the jabs are voluntary, mind.
A further benefit is that they can destroy the whole “body positive” fat cunt bollocks. Those fat tarts can actually slim down, as some already have. Good for them.
A couple of amusing anecdotes about that body positive movement:
My obese brother has just learned that the shop that specialised in over sized clothing he used has closed Dow because of reduced trade and ….
Timpsons recently reported a 680% increase in the number of people requesting extra holes in their belts (the baseline number wasn’t reported)
Apparently people weren’t comfortable with their weight.
Christ, are there really people who cannot put holes in their own belts?
I’ve done it a few times with an awl, to mixed results. I suppose now in amazon world if i needed to i could get a cheap leather hole punch delivered in the next 5 mins.
I always used a corkscrew, and would give it a bit of help with the sharp end of a small kitchen knife.
It really needs a smooth circular cut to stop tension in the belt tending to pull the buckle pin along a developing crack.
As the bish said to actress.
I use an electric drill. Making holes is what it’s for.
Usually not so much cannot as don’t want to. But I can remember a friend drilling several holes in a leather belt for me because I didn’t have any tools with which to do it [I was staying in my (now) brother-in-law’s student flat in London while doing a vac job]. On other occasions I have drilled holes myself
“Timpsons recently reported a 680% increase in the number of people requesting extra holes in their belts”
My dad had one of these in his tool box when I was a kid (so at least 50 years ago). After he passed away it was one of the few things I took from his belongings. Still works a treat.
Not sure this is correct Norman – if they die young they don’t cost anything in pensions and care homes etc.
Not that (personally) I believe in such a utilitarian view of humanity.
I think it is tough for some people – imagine being a straight white man losing your job in a car factory at 45.
There actually aren’t many options for you.
The system is fucked up, but the average 90IQ Joe didn’t fuck it up, he just exists in it.
Comfort eating perhaps gives comfort.
I dunno.
Perhaps I’m going soft in my middle age.
I’m not getting all Fabian about this. Before the fat jabs people would get fat and – revealed preferences – few did much of significance about it. Now they can have jabs, lose weight, often feel better about themselves, and do more than they could when fat. One of those things might be crossing a road, when they then risk being knocked over by a bus or more modern hazard. Tradeoffs.
It was the claim that ‘they end up being a net drain on society’s resources’ that I was questioning.
They’re unproductive, or rather, less productive than they might be, whereas those expensively retired and nearing the end of their lives have mostly led productive working lives.
So the problem with idle fat cunts is that they bring down society’s productivity in general. They’re not generating what they’ll need for their own retirement, and are more expensive in their “productive” years.
‘Course, I’d like to see figures which explore that.
The change in Ralph Lauren advertising over the last 5 years is a delight to behold. No more bloaters.
Every time I go online to play a bit of chess I am confronted with ads saying “Obesity is not a choice.” You are a helpless victim and it’s out of your control. Well I am a supporter of free markets and if the advertisers have found a way to make money by encouraging those with runaway pleasure centers and no self-control, good luck to them.
The ads I get bombarded with say “Obesity is a disease”.
No the hell it isn’t. It may be an ILLNESS, but it’s not a disease. You can’t catch it from somebody. Somebody sneezes on you, “good god, I’ve caught obesity!”
Big Pharma’s wet dream is a product that you “have” to take for the rest of your life.
Statins are one.
This is probably another.
Statins are wonderful. If you have had no symptoms of heart problems they do you no good at all. (But you might suffer from side-effects.) If you have had symptoms they do you a tiny bit of good but, it turns out, probably as a consequence of their mild anti-inflammatory action. The anti-cholesterol action does nowt for you.
Statins are generic; mostly manufactured in India and China. A highly competitive market. Big Pharma isn’t getting ‘fat’ of them.
It did while they were still under patent protection.
Gamecock wants some of that placebo.
Jolly good. But what you want is long term data on mortality rates: how many made it to 60, 65, 70, 75 …
That’ll take time to gather – unless the news turns out to be strikingly bad in which case you might learn it pretty quickly.
Hello, what do we have here?
“Obesity, high blood pressure, and triglycerides are known to raise heart risks, one would have expected the retatrutide patients to have fewer heart attacks, strokes, or cardiovascular deaths. They didn’t. They had more. Twenty-seven people on retatrutide suffered those cardiac events, compared to 23 on placebo, a 12 percent difference.
The difference was not statistically significant, meaning that the extra deaths and other problems in the retratrutide patients could have been due to chance.
But it was puzzling and disappointing. At a minimum, it suggests that retatrutide’s heart benefits are marginal, for whatever reason. Worse, it raises a question if the drug (and other GLPs) are somehow causing direct cardiovascular harm in a way that undoes the indirect benefits from their weight loss.”
Source: Alex Berenson’s substack.
Was the trial over a long enough time for those positive effects to show through? I can’t tell whether this is something to worry about, or just that the sample was of people with significant weight-related health problems so we’d expect a fair few heart problems whatever.
I guess we’d need to know when in the trial these happened (early on and it’s probably just the initial health problems), whether the increased heart problems correlated to increased dose, and whether the heart problems in the people taking the drug were amongst those who had successfully lost weight or those who hadn’t.
Without that, 23 vs 27 in 1,000 could just be random.
Isnt a triglyceride that dinosaur with three horns ?
The heart issues will have been brewing for years, when the participants were overweight. An 80-week trial won’t have put much of a dent in prior health problems.
That’s over a year-and-a-half (80-week) trial.
The shocking thing is that only 6% of the placebo group managed to lose 20% of their weight over that time. And presumably this is a self-selecting group who have serious problems with their weight (type 2 diabetes) and have sufficient motivation to do something about it to at least sign up for the trial.
What are we talking about here – probably over 16 stone going down 20% to closer to 13 stone? Would that take you from diabetes problems to low risk? Over 80 weeks, that’s less than half a pound a week.
Giving up eating carbohydrates has much the same effect, and is probably cheaper.
But most people can’t, or they would. Revealed preferences.
But people have been told for decades by ‘health care experts’ that it is fat that causes their obesity and they should eat low fat foods like yoghurt and museli, which are crammed with carbs and sugar to make them palatable.
“… an HbA1c (measuring average blood sugar levels for the last two to three months) of 6.5% or lower, a standard threshold used to diagnose type 2 diabetes, “
So not diagnosed by symptoms – it’s not a disease if there are no symptoms. Like the PCR Test for Covid – no symptoms, no disease just positive result for presence of viral “”dandruff”.
Type 2 Diabetes – or “pre-diabetes” (we are all pre-diabetic until we get it) – is a manufactured non-disease like non-coeliac gluten intolerance. It’s to keep the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex in riches.
Once upon a time there were two types of diabetes: hypoglycæmic and hyperglycæmic diabetes. Differential diagnosis was made according to symptoms.
Not everyone “overweight” develops diabetes, many people who are thin, develop diabetes. For a causal relationship to exist between two variables there must be correlation. Just one outlier = no causal relationship. They get round this with “increased risk” – an unquantifiable abstract.
Diabetes, being a physiological disorder, can cause weight gain – you get fat because you have diabetes, not the other way round.
Exactly.
I get very annoyed by the constant linking of obesity to diabetes. My diabetes was worst when my weight was low.
Some of it is hereditary and some caused by another condition. It is by no means a given that being fat will mean you will be diabetic.
How much of this is psychological? There are no medical reasons for being fat. It’s simply eating too much. So you do some drug supposed to reduce appetite. So how much is the drug & how much imagination?
Yep. Curing obesity is easy:
“Don’t eat so damn much.”
You show a fat geezer died of starvation.
Reminds me of a story Rush Limbaugh covered 20+ years ago.
News reports of poverty in US. People in Africa and Asia were stunned by the pix of American poor. They were obese.
See Tim’s post above. Even the placebo group saw a benefit (imagination?) but the drug groups saw more benefit with more drug use.
The placebo had no side effects. Presumably. I’d like to see if any reported.
The placebo group may have been told what the study was about, hence, changed their eating habits.
All the groups were given “dietary counselling and guidance on physical activity”. I think it’s pretty certain all the participants knew they were involved in a trial for a “diet” drug.
I’m actually more interested in what side effects the drug has. If you’re given a drug, you’re often aware that you’ve had it apart from what it’s supposed to be doing. Funny taste in the mouth, often. Maybe one feels unusually warm or lethargic. All sorts of things. As I said above, obesity’s 100% psychological. Sufferers aren’t hungry. Most of them don’t have a metric for hunger. They’ve never been hungry in their lives. It’s just an urge to stuff something down their gullet. Reassurance?
So they’ve signed up for the course. They want to lose weight. They’re aware the drug is in them. They don’t feel hungry.. How much of it is actually the drug? Are the people who have received the placebo aware there’s something in their system?. Does it do anything or is it neutral?
They give figures for the effect of the placebo – which does have some effect, weight loss of 5.1%: the impact of the low dose of the drug was more than twice as good and the medium dose more than three times as good, the high dose had a bit more effect that than the medium dose.
The medical report will give details of all observed side-effects (that is all the ones that they were watching for even if they were negligible and any unexpected side-effects that they noticed).
One of the known side-effects of these drugs is sudden, irreversible blindness (usually unilateral). It’s rare, but I’m not prepared to risk it.