It seems to be like treating alcoholism with disulfiram: it's a miracle in clinical trials but in the real world the patients just lower the doses or discontinue treatment after 1-2 years and go back to their old habits.
This is one of the wildest claims I have ever seen on this website.
Would you claim insulin is ineffective outside of clinical trials for treating type 1 diabetes because people have to keep injecting it?
Type 1 diabetes (or majority of diseases) doesn't involve addiction.
This is totally false. I know a number of people who took GLP-1 to treat their obesity and then stopped and have stayed not obese.
This study found that 84.4% non-diabetic patients stop taking GLP-1 drugs within two years. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Do you have a source for this "lack of real-world efficacy"?
> This study found that 84.4% non-diabetic patients stop taking GLP-1 drugs within two years
"With a with a median on-treatment weight change of −2.9%" [1]. Of those who discontinued and experienced "weight gain since discontinuation," they were "associated with an increased likelihood of GLP-1 RA reinitiation."
I'm genuinely struggling to see how this source shows real world inefficacy. In my friends, all of them stopped taking GLP-1 drugs within 2 years because all of them lost the weight they wanted to.
Out of curiosity, what sources lead you to believe this?
> it's like the drug disulfiram
Have clinicians made this connection?
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> In my friends, all of them stopped taking GLP-1 drugs within 2 years because all of them lost the weight they wanted to. Out of curiosity, what sources lead you to believe this?
Anecdotes like this are interesting but in medicine they are not sufficient to make factual statements about drugs. In meta-analyses there is weight regain which is steeper as more weight is lost during treatment [1].
The weight regain seems to be rather slow, it can take years until the baseline weight is reached.
What does "steeper" mean? The studies I've seen show a net weight loss, even after regain, for the median patient.
> The weight regain seems to be rather slow, it can take years until the baseline weight is reached
Maybe. Right now, however, the evidence shows solid effects outside clinical settings. Your original statement was wrong–your sources own refute the claim.
If you're arguing the effects in the real world haven't consistently been as ridiculous as they were in clinical trials, sure, you get a brownie point. But broadly speaking, these drugs are terrifically effective, both when taken for life and when taken intermittently.