LONDON, May 1 \u2014 The World Health Organisation plans to officially back the use of weight-loss drugs to treat obesity in adults for the first time, a memo reviewed by Reuters today shows, marking a shift in its approach to treating the global health problem.<\/p>\n
The UN agency also called for strategies to improve access to the treatment in low- and middle-income countries.<\/p>\n
More than a billion people now have obesity worldwide, according to the WHO, and around 70 per cent of them live in low and middle-income countries, the World Bank estimates.<\/p>\n
The wildly popular obesity drugs \u2014 Wegovy developed by Novo Nordisk and Zepbound by Eli Lilly \u2014 are known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, which mimic the activity of a hormone that slows digestion and helps people feel full for longer. In clinical trials, people lost 15 per cent to 20 per cent of their body weight, depending on the drug.<\/p>\n
The drugs have been launched in the United States and other high-income countries like Germany and Britain.<\/p>\n
But they can cost over US$1,000 a month, and studies suggest people may have to take the drugs for the rest of their lives to keep the weight off.<\/p>\n
The WHO, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk were not immediately available for comment.<\/p>\n
The WHO\u2019s conditional recommendation will be officially released in August, as part of new guidelines on treating obesity. It is also working on separate guidelines for children and adolescents.<\/p>\n
Separately, WHO experts will also meet next week to decide whether to include the GLP-1 drugs in the agency\u2019s essential medicines list \u2014 both to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n
The WHO\u2019s essential medicines list is a catalogue of the drugs that should be available in all functioning health systems, and it can help make drugs more widely available in poorer countries, as experts say happened in 2002 when HIV drugs were included.<\/p>\n
In 2023, the experts decided against adding obesity drugs to the list, with WHO saying more evidence was needed on their long-term clinical benefit.<\/p>\n
However, in the new memo recommending their use as a treatment, the agency says it supports including them on the list this time round.<\/p>\n
Still, the WHO also raises concerns over the cost of the drugs and calls for longer-term studies on cost-effectiveness \u201cacross all settings, including LMICs\u201d (low- and middle-income countries).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe same mechanisms that are used in large-scale medicine access programmes may need to be adopted,\u201d to improve access, the WHO adds, such as tiered pricing or pooled procurement.<\/p>\n
But it also notes that the active ingredient in one of the newer drugs, semaglutide \u2014 used in Novo\u2019s Wegovy \u2014 comes off patent in some markets next year.<\/p>\n
Several companies are planning to launch cheaper generic versions of the drugs then. Liraglutide, the active ingredient in the older generation of drugs, is already available as a lower-cost generic drug, with products approved in the US and Europe, the memo adds. \u2014 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON, May 1 \u2014 The World Health Organisation plans to officially back the use of weight-loss drugs to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4315],"tags":[105,4326,16,15,10891,5836,27907,34627],"class_list":{"0":"post-68872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-medication","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-wegovy","13":"tag-weight-loss-drug","14":"tag-world-health-organisation-who","15":"tag-zepbound"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114439253144035502","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}