Teens Are Taking Wegovy for Weight Loss. But Doctors Have a Lot to Learn

For a long time, if Dr. Emily Breidbart, a pediatric endocrinologist at NYU Langone Health, wanted to put one of her patients on a weight-loss drug, she often chose metformin. It wasn’t a perfect option. The drug is approved to treat diabetes, not obesity, and typically leads only to “very modest” weight loss, she says. But Breidbart had few other choices for her adolescent patients. “Medications that have been approved for obesity really have been few and far between” for kids and teenagers, she says. That changed in late 2022, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s obesity treatment Wegovy for kids as young as 12. That approval was a “game changer” for kids with a medical need to lose weight, says Dr. Susma Vaidya, a pediatric obesity specialist at Children’s National Hospital. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But the approval was also somewhat controversial. Wegovy—an injected semaglutide medication, like its even buzzier sibling Ozempic—slows digestion and mimics a hormone that regulates appetite, leading people who take the drug to eat far less than before they started taking it. For some people, the idea of putting still-growing kids on an appetite-suppressing drug, potentially for life, raised alarm bells about physical and psychological long-term effects. Wegovy promises potentially dramatic benefits for some of the roughly 20% of U.S. kids and teenagers with obes...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Drugs healthscienceclimate Source Type: news