Have you seen the new GLP-1 agonists? They only got approved for obesity last year, and might actually make a dent. The next generation are apparently even better.
Making these cheaper, more available, and with non-needle delivery are all worthy interventions, more tractable imo than the policy steering you described. But I don’t know if they need charity, the market is vast.
GLP agonists are absolutely game changers in the obesity medicine space. (I’m a rehab physician with an interest in obesity medicine and recently have been offered positions in obesity clinics, largely to prescribe these medications). Basically clinics do counselling, dietician, etc., but really need physicians to prescribe these medications because they are so effective. Currently available by injection in Canada, but an oral one is coming. The GLP-1 agonist are covered by most insurance in Canada.
CBT for binge eating disorder also seems to have emerging evidence. Teaching people to feel their feelings instead of feeding them is very helpful.
In terms of diets, I’ve seen a lot of evidence support low carbohydrate interventions, and I recommend dietdoctor.com and The Obesity Code (Jason Fung) to my patients.
Diabetes/Insulin resistance leads to most of the disability I see, as a disability specialist. I just presented a poster on this at a conference.
The medications, at least while they are patented, are likely to be quite expensive and therefore unlikely to be super cost-effective. I have some links in the article that go into estimating cost-effectiveness of GLP-1 agonists, and it doesn’t look too exciting. That being said, if there was a way to make them cheaper by 2-3 orders of magnitude (not sure how feasible), maybe this picture changes.
In addition, I would worry that access to them (as with all medicines) does reduce how scalable an itervention it is.
Yeah, I think that this is probably an area of pharma where the market has sufficient incentives and is vast, and don’t think there is that much scope for and/or benefit of a new organisation, profit or non profit :)
Have you seen the new GLP-1 agonists? They only got approved for obesity last year, and might actually make a dent. The next generation are apparently even better.
Making these cheaper, more available, and with non-needle delivery are all worthy interventions, more tractable imo than the policy steering you described. But I don’t know if they need charity, the market is vast.
GLP agonists are absolutely game changers in the obesity medicine space. (I’m a rehab physician with an interest in obesity medicine and recently have been offered positions in obesity clinics, largely to prescribe these medications). Basically clinics do counselling, dietician, etc., but really need physicians to prescribe these medications because they are so effective. Currently available by injection in Canada, but an oral one is coming. The GLP-1 agonist are covered by most insurance in Canada.
CBT for binge eating disorder also seems to have emerging evidence. Teaching people to feel their feelings instead of feeding them is very helpful. In terms of diets, I’ve seen a lot of evidence support low carbohydrate interventions, and I recommend dietdoctor.com and The Obesity Code (Jason Fung) to my patients.
Diabetes/Insulin resistance leads to most of the disability I see, as a disability specialist. I just presented a poster on this at a conference.
Hey Gavin, good question. My intuition is that:
The medications, at least while they are patented, are likely to be quite expensive and therefore unlikely to be super cost-effective. I have some links in the article that go into estimating cost-effectiveness of GLP-1 agonists, and it doesn’t look too exciting. That being said, if there was a way to make them cheaper by 2-3 orders of magnitude (not sure how feasible), maybe this picture changes.
In addition, I would worry that access to them (as with all medicines) does reduce how scalable an itervention it is.
Yeah, I think that this is probably an area of pharma where the market has sufficient incentives and is vast, and don’t think there is that much scope for and/or benefit of a new organisation, profit or non profit :)