FRIDAY, Oct. 25, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- As the popularity of GLP-1 meds like Wegovy and Zepbound grows, fewer Americans are turning to weight-loss surgeries to trim their waistlines, a new report finds. Prescriptions of this GLP-1 class of diabetes and weight-loss medications more than doubled between 2022 and 2023, a new tally finds.
"In contrast, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery" during the same time period, reported a team led by Dr. Thomas Tsai , an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy (the first GLP-1 medicine aimed at weight loss) in mid-2021, sales of the drug and related GLP-1 meds such as Ozempic , Mounjaro and Zepbound have soared.
Rapid weight loss has been a hallmark of these medications, which work, in part, by making folks feel full earlier. Prior to the advent of GLP-1s, diet and exercise or bariatric surgeries were the main routes to weight loss for obese Americans. However, the "Ozempic era" may have changed all that, Tsai's team said.
"Anecdotally, health systems have closed hospital-based metabolic bariatric surgery programs due to decreased demand," they noted in the introduction to their study. To get at harder numbers, the researchers tracked data from the medical records of more than 17 million Americans insured via private coverage or Medicare Advantage. All patients were non-diabetic but obese.
They tracked trends i.