The research says that young kids should not take the new drugs
Should Young Children Take the New Anti-Obesity Drugs? What the Research Says: “Such Children and Young Children should take the new anti-Obesity drugs?”
Nutter has reservations about obesity drugs in general, and especially for children and adolescents, whose bodies are still developing. She is also concerned that families might make decisions on the basis of weight stigma, rather than looking at whether a child — at whatever weight — is healthy. She says that a culture that glorifies thinness and criticizes and shames people who have higher body weight is ingrained in families.
He says that many doctors make decisions based on trials in adults. “We need to have evidence from children to inform clinical decision-making.”
That question is growing more urgent in the face of mounting evidence that children and adolescents, as well as adults, slim down if they take the latest generation of obesity drugs. The drugs mimic a natural hormone called GLP-1 and have been shown to help adolescents lose weight. semaglutide is approved in the United States and Europe to treat morbidly obese children as young as 12 years old.
Source: Should young kids take the new anti-obesity drugs? What the research says
Statistical analysis of BMI, a poor surrogate for fat mass for children of colour, and its implications for anti-obesity drugs
But 72% of the 82 participants in that study were white, and only 6 individuals were Black, so the results might not generalize to children of colour. More diverse studies are needed, Ball says.
The latest trial’s strategy of using BMI to measure progress has disadvantages, scientists point out. The body mass index is not perfect. For kids, because they’re growing, it’s not an ideal metric,” says Ball. “We know that BMI is a poor surrogate for fat mass,” wrote the authors of an editorial4 that accompanied the findings.
Sarah Nutter, a weight stigma researcher at the University of Victoria in Canada, suggests that obese people should be defined by their health problems. The authors of the study should have used a more reliable indicator of health than BMI, she says.
Source: Should young kids take the new anti-obesity drugs? What the research says
The Effects of GLP-1 on Children, Their Families, and Their Children. Does Childhood Obesity Affect Body Mass Index?
Not much. Ro doesn’t have long-term data about the effects of GLP-1 on young children. That’s partly because the drugs are relatively untested in the youngest people. The United States has not approved GLP-1 mimics for treating obese children younger than 12 years old.
The children who participated in the study received liraglutide for a year and were followed for another six months. The study’s authors plan to continue to collect data on the drug’s safety until January 2027.
Long term drugs include GLP-1 mimics. “Obesity is a chronic progressive relapsing disease that requires ongoing treatment,” says Ro. But, in practice, some children will need to stop taking the drugs — when their families lose insurance coverage, for example, or if the negative side effects, such as nausea, become intolerable. What the exit strategy would look like for kids is a key question for further research.
The children are aware that they can be bullied by peers. Ro says no one seems to be talking about the risks of doing nothing. She says that carrying a lot of weight can affect growth and puberty, as well as mental health and lifespan. “As in all things,” she adds, “we need to weigh the risks and benefits of treatment versus no treatment.”
The medical community has never provided a definition of obese as a disease. It’s typically understood as an excess of body fat, using body mass index, or B.M.I., to gauge who has too much. But B.M.I. — a person’s weight divided by the square of their height — was never meant to be used as a diagnostic tool and can’t determine whether someone is healthy or sick. There is no consensus on the signs and symptoms that make a person obese, or the way to tell if a person has a heart disease.
B.M.I. was not always right; in an age of effective weight loss drugs it was no longer possible. 40 percent of American adults are classified as obese if they have a B.M.I. of 30 or above. The new treatments that cost upwards of $1,000 per person per month along with supply shortages are just some of the factors that make definition of Obesity more than a fight over terminology. It’s about pinpointing who is sick and will benefit from health care and how to triage that treatment and most effectively allocate resources. It is about ending the confusion that surrounds diagnosis of overweight people.
A new study has found that people aged 14 years and older who are morbidly obese are more susceptible to weight gain when they take anti-obesity drugs. The research, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also suggested that the use of these drugs in this age group could have a negative impact on their body mass index (BMI).