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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

One third (35%) of people who took a new drug for treating obesity lost more than one-fifth (greater than or equal to 20%) of their total body weight, according to a major global study involving UCL researchers.

The drug, semaglutide, works by hijacking the body's own appetite regulating system in the brain leading to reduced hunger and calorie intake.

Three quarters (75%) of people who received semaglutide 2.4mg lost more than 10% of their body weight and more than one-third lost more than 20%. No other drug has come close to producing this level of weight loss -- this really is a gamechanger.

The drug possesses a compound structurally similar to (and mimics) the human glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) hormone, which is released into the blood from the gut after meals.

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I think it is important to note that a 10% drop (if mostly fat) can bring significant quality of life improvements for people who are experiencing issues related to obesity.

Imagine you walk around with a 30 lbs bag of flour on your back all the time. Then, all of a sudden, you are able to put that bag down.

The faster you lose weight (this is all anecdotal) the more it is like putting that bag down all at once.

Now, can they keep the weight of after losing it? Because I can gain those 30 lbs back very, very quickly.

I was overweight when the pandemic started (24% bf). I lost 10% of my body weight in a few months. It’s insane how much your athletic ability jumps just from that. I used to work out intensely before and would make marginal improvements in stamina/speed/etc.

In my experience it is losing the initial weight that is the easy part and keeping it off long term that's hard. However the mechanism the drug uses sounds promising that regard (assuming your body doesn't adapt to it), although it would mean adding another lifetime drug to my list.

Yeah, I have sleep apnea and GERD, likely related to obesity (I drank beer and coffee constantly for my entire adult life too though; coffee so I could work, beer after to relax)... but I'm wondering how much is related to obesity.

I can feel the fat pushing and creating pressure points, which contributes to both conditions. The crazy thing, is I'm not like super fat or anything. 6'2" 245lbs was my max, and I'm at 235lbs now... I felt perfectly fine at 225 when I worked out. Seems like such a small difference, but I've gotten virtually no exercise with covid, so it's not a fair comparison.

That's enough for obesity, but the crazy thing is it's not considered fat at all in the USA, if you're a guy. You just "aren't in your early 20s anymore", or have a "dad bod", or you're a loveable jolly rascal that loves life (eg. Chris Pratt in P&R). We act like it's practically inevitable and not a horrific medical condition that's causing me to be eaten from the inside out by my own acid.

I know some of this is just luck, but I wonder what truly fat people have to deal with. I couldn't imagine my reflux being better if I was say 275-300+.

Parts 6 and 7 of this Youtube series on the risks of obesity are on sleep apnea and GERD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGnVgbUHtKI&list=PLyqKj7LwU2...

If the drug can be administered long term, perhaps there is hope they will keep the weight off.

If it is the same as the glucagon hormone mentioned by the grandparent comment, it SHOULD be 'natural' and have no side effects.

But just look at reproductive hormone treatments (the pill) to see how things like this can go wrong (serious mental side effects; my sister struggled with seasonal depression for half her life, turns out it was just the pill. My girlfriend developed suicidal ideation from the Mirena coil. They stopped a research in male anticonception medication because of the mood swings).

The drug doesn't actually "burn" fat, as the previous headline suggested, but reduces appetite.

All known drugs that actually trick the body into burning more fat are kind of dangerous, some are lethally dangerous from a single overdose. And they would reduce the appetite, oppositely some cause monstrous appetite.

I'm 80-85kg 173cm man. Months of strenuous exercise doesn't barely make me reach 78-79. Though they do make me feel much better, and energetic.

A therapy needs to do both, somehow make the body consume more energy from fat specifically, and not cause excess appetite. This can be one leg of that.

> somehow make the body consume more energy from fat specifically

Any way to achieve a calorie deficit will accomplish this. There doesn't have to be a second drug to make your body use fat as energy once you've already given it no other choice.

Hearing about a drug that hijacks the body's appetite makes me feel like we're in the prologue to a zombie movie.

Plenty of drugs do things that sound scarier to me--a layperson. SSRIs change the way you think and feel. Pain killers hijack your nervous system so you don't feel pain.

Are zombies such a big problem , given modern weapons and armies/police ?

Have you read World War Z? It covers that very question in great detail.

One problem it highlights is that modern armies and military tactics are incredibly inefficient. The amount of fuel, munitions and calories they use for every kill is staggering. Also much of modern military tactics are based around putting on a massive show of force up front and hoping the enemy surrenders or retreats. That is not a problem if you only have to kill a few thousand people who's spirit to fight can be broken, and you're backed up by a fully functional logistics network. Remove the logistics network and face off against an 'army' of hunderds of thousands of enemies that will never retreat then those tactics will quickly see your fuel and munition stores depleted.

Towards the end of the book the Army has reinvented the infantry square and equipped all their soldiers with bolt action rifles to stop them wasting ammo.

World war Z is cool, but it's a fantazy. For example it pretends that tanks can't drive through a zombie horde because the tracks would come off. Thats conoletely absurd - tanks can drive through trees, let alone people, tank crews call infantry 'crunchies'.

If you want to see how a zombie horde would fare on a battlefield, look at how infantry and cavalary charges did against ww1 machineguns. It would be like that, but 10x worse.

Besides, there is the whole issue of zombies rotting and concervation of energy - after a few months they should turn to rotten goo, or motionless husks.

In WWZ, the battle of Yonkers highlighted some of the issues with traditional military techniques. The zombies had superior numbers (millions!) and required a headshot to take down. The shock and awe doctrine of the military worked on the first ten thousand zombies or so, but they keep coming.

Machine guns lack the accuracy to stop a zombie completely, and have a limited capacity relative to millions of attackers. Tanks would be able to run over zombies, but eventually would be swamped or simply run out of fuel. All the strategies relied on fighting an enemy with human emotions and a survival instinct, the two things zombies lack.

It would be like that, but 10x worse.

Oh absolutely and I think the book agrees. I recall them describing battles where the piles of dead zombies where so high the soldiers couldn't see the next wave approaching. The hard part was never killing zombies but making sure you killed all the zombies before you ran out of fuel and bullets.

Based on what I saw in the movie, didn't read the book the rate of infection is unrealistic, at least the time it takes from initial exposure to full on aggressive zombie mode was a few seconds. Realistically this would take much longer than that which means we won't end up with hordes of zombies instantly.

Your main problem in the long run is, that zombies are infectious. Imagine that in every water hole and in every dark place could be a zombie sleeping... The virus could mutate and infect animals or insects.

Armies and police are fallible even when facing a known threat. There's a trial going on in the American senate right now about that...

The global virus pandemic that is responsible for a total lockdown and a multitude of deaths and spread immediately via global transportation system wasn't enough for you?

Worse, it's mutating! It's just like most zombie movie plots.

None of those predicted the hoarding of toilet paper though.

Maybe we're just hedging our bets for multiple zombie movies?

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