Weight ‘game changer’
Diabetes drug sheds kilos
FOR the past 30 years, Julie Williger’s New Year’s resolution has been to lose weight, but 2022 was the first time she had already achieved it thanks to a new diabetes drug that is helping thousands of Australians to lose weight.
Semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic, is a once-a-week, self-administered injectable drug only approved for type 2 diabetes, but it is being prescribed off label to thousands of people such as Mrs Williger for weight loss.
“It stops you from feeling hungry, you don’t feel like sweet things. I’m now down to 78kg from 99kg last year,” the 49-year-old from Wollongong said.
Associate Professor Samantha Hocking, endocrinologist, diabetes and weight loss expert from Sydney University, said Semaglutide worked by suppressing appetite receptors in the brain.
“These medications help regulate appetite control in the brain, that is how they lower body weight in terms of how they help people with diabetes, they work on the pancreas and help the pancreas make insulin in response to glucose. They also delay gastric emptying, they slow down how quickly that food enters into your intestines,” she said.
In a double blind study of 1961 adults with a body-mass index of 30 or more (obese), the average weight loss over 68 weeks on the drug was 14.9 per cent of body weight compared to 2.4 per cent in the group that did not receive the drug.
“The dose we currently have in Australia (for diabetes) is not the dose that has been studied for weight loss,” she said. “The dose for weight loss is 2.4mg weekly but the dose for diabetes is 0.5mg or 1mg weekly dose, so it is significantly lower than the dose in the weight-loss trials.
“On the 2.4mg weekly dose, people are achieving up to 15-16 per cent body weight reduction and that really is a game changer, it is much better than any other weight-loss medications available.”
Professor Hocking said she had seen good results in her patients who were prescribed the lower dose for weight loss.
“Some people have done exceptionally well on the 1mg dose in terms of losing weight,” she said.
Makers of the drug, Nova Nordisk, have an application before the TGA specifically for use for weight loss marketed as Wegovy, yet it has to go through a separate approval process.
More than 4500 people are sharing their success in a social media group set up for Ozempic weight loss.