This is specifically a study on people with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, which is associated with accelerated aging. Not clear what this would mean for people generally.
Those are causes, you can't just invert it (again) and call them mechanisms for anti-aging... Those things are side effects of obesity and diseases causing obesity, there is no evidence or reasonable basis here to suggest there would be any "anti-aging" effect in healthy people without those problems.
Similarly "Ozempic shows anti-gravity effect in humans!#11"... assuming you have unhealthy excess fat to lose.
More than 70% of Americans are overweight. That's a pretty overwhelming majority. Most of the Western world and significant portions of the Eastern world are trending in the same direction.
The point is that this can be generalized to a whole lot of people, not just those with HIV.
And there are other causes of inflammation besides just being overweight, and the GLP-1s reduce inflammation basically immediately, even with no weight loss.
The thing with ozempic is that is seems to do several things, most (all?) of them good for us in different ways. We probably just lucked out. It's not the only case - plenty of drugs do incredibly good things with only reasonable side effects. Antibiotics. Ibuprofen. Aspirin. Vitamin D.
A recent example - statins used to be seen as a tradeoff: you get better cardiovascular health, but some hepatotoxicity. Nope, it was wrong - they actually protect your liver. I think the official change came out this year, when I started them a couple of years ago I still found it framed as a side effect.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20200108-the-medication...
It would mean quantifying the risks of side effects versus the risks of not taking the drugs, which we should be doing anyway.
If you read "changes in personality" listed as a very rare side effect on the drug's sheet (which yes, you should read once when you start taking the drug), you can evaluate it, maybe make a mental note etc.
But if you make (or share) a bbc article on a particularly rare side effect, completely out of context, you're privileging the hypothesis. Why this particular side effects should be brought up for consideration? Other than in sounds weird and gets clicks.
Edit: I forgot. Ibuprofen also causes (non trivial) stomach bleeding and increases blood pressure. And many other things too.
Never knew about the potential stomach bleeds until I took my mother to the hospital earlier this year. Ironically, she was taking Motrin given to her in the same hospital a week earlier.
But this reinforces my main point - if we ended up comparing ozempic with ibuprofen, we definitely lucked out. Considering the benefits it offers it might be worth taken by some people even if it was on the level of chemotherapy.
One, GLP-1s are not a new class of drug. We have had them in various forms for about two decades now.
Two, the clinical trials have followed the standard sort of schedule as any other medication we release. I don't hear or see all the hand-wringing that these have received over every other medication we develop.
Three, they are analogs to hormones our bodies already produce. They're not some totally alien substance that we have zero understanding of. We modify them to have longer half-lives, bind more strongly/weakly to certain receptors, etc., but it's not like these are significant departures from things our body already handles day in and day out.
Yes, maybe there is something specific to semaglutide or tirzepatide or the newer generations of GLP-1 medications that we don't understand that has some sort of long term effect. But what is the foundation for that worry? Exenatide has not shown any of those concerns in two decades of use. Basically every single health marker that changes when on these drugs changes in (often profoundly!) positive ways. It makes significant positive impact on the cause of the single largest increased in all-cause mortality for the Western world. Newer generations are even more promising - retatutride has shown significant anti-cancer impacts on rodent studies, and mechanistically the pathways it is acting on there work very similarly in humans, so there is strong reason to believe that will carry over. Even the modern generations have a huge list of benefits that take place basically immediately upon beginning to take them, even without significant weight loss, including protection against CVD-related incidents such as heart attacks, strokes, and deaths related to them.
What we know today about all of the positive impact they have, mechanistically how they are doing it, and the data we have on this class of medication being used in general... the side-effects would have to be hugely detrimental and in a way that just doesn't make much sense based on our current understanding.
It's not impossible, of course, but worrying about it seems silly unless your general stance is that you won't take any medication until that specific formulation has been on the market for decades.
Yes, I'd argue that this is the default stance for many healthcare professionals.
Many is hard to quantify. In my experience it is not the majority, nor is it a stance that makes much sense to me in general.
A legitimate worry, one Taleb might be bringing up, is that we should hold Ozempic to a higher standard because it's being taken by many people, and any problems it has down the line will have a much larger impact. But that 1. is happening anyways and 2. is not influencing an individual decision to take it or not, it's a society thing.
What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline that is bad.
There's no magic sauce in ozempic that makes you lose more buccal fat than other weight loss methods. That's just not real, it doesn't exist.
When you go from lots of buccal fat to no buccal fat, you will look gaunt in comparison. You've always had low fat so there's no frame of reference, so nobody calls you gaunt.
But, if you gained say 30 pounds, you would look much less gaunt than you currently do.
Either that or you're not as slim as you think you are. At 5'9 a normal BMI sits at 135 pounds for a man - you need to get very thin to have thin cheeks. Its possible you're slim, but not slim enough to have slim cheeks.
Also you lose buccal fat as you age. But ozempic does not age you.
And then of course fat distribution varies person to person. You might be slim but have abnormally large amounts of buccal fat. That can happen, but it doesn't mean that if you got thin via ozempic you'd lose the buccal fat. Again, there's no mechanism for that.
If you still don't believe me, just compare someone thin via ozempic versus someone naturally thin at the exact same weight and height and gender. Notice the buccal fat - the naturally thin person doesn't have more. It just feels that way, because you've never seen them with more buccal fat so the amount they have seems "right". Whereas, for the ozempic person, it seems less.
And, for the record, you haven't provided any evidence either. You're just "saying your observations".
And, let's all be real here, skinny person to skinny person. Most skinny people are extraordinarily biased against ozempic because they lose moral high ground to people they dislike.
I think a lot of skinny people want to desperately believe they are special or better in some ways than ozempic users. For a lot of them, being skinny is all they have: (
But that's not the case. That's something I'm fine with, I suggest you get there too.
Among other things, you've put yourself in the position of claiming - but not arguing, because you provide no reasoning to engage with - that there are no black swans in the world. It's entirely untenable.
What they saw might have been an outlier. Perhaps they misunderstood. They might be confused or uniformed or any number of things. They could even be lying outright! But to respond by dismissing a claimed observation without evidence or reason is not a constructive attitude and I would even argue anti-intellectual.
There is no reasonable response once you turn the conversation into this, please don't do that.
If you claim differently, the burden of proof is on YOU. Not me.
Your observations be damned. Elephant in the room: observations from biased actors are less than worthless.
The reason this observation came to be is because people seek an easy way to punch down on ozempic users and differentiate their weight status from ozempic users. I've already explained that.
I literally realized how amazing life must be for a hot girl.
Must have been because of how disgusting I look...
I think you may be making things up to make yourself feel better friend.
The people who should be taking Ozempic aren't lacking in buccal fat.
Besides ensuring you're getting sufficient water, there are a lot of dermatologic procedures that can help you to recover at least some of your skin elasticity. And in more dramatic cases, there's a plethora of options, from fillers to lifting procedures.