Powerful weight loss medications aren’t reaching the people who need them most, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
The barriers to the drugs are many: Getting a prescription; finding a pharmacy with the drug in stock and being able to pay for it.
“Obesity has been a long-standing clinical and public health change and it’s growing in scope,” said Dr. Chiadi Ndumele, director of obesity and cardiometabolic research in the division of cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, who presented the findings Tuesday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“In recent years, we’ve developed increasingly powerful pharmacotherapies, particularly these GLP-1 receptor agonists, that have a fairly profound impact on obesity,” he said, referring to the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound.
“That being said,” Ndumele said, “we still recognize that the uptake of these agents is still fairly limited.”
The new findings come shortly after NBC News reported on the deep racial and geographical disparities seen in the United States among those who are prescribed a weight loss drug.
Insurance, in particular, can be a major obstacle, given the drugs’ expensive list price, averaging around $1,000 a month. But the Hopkins researchers found that even among patients whose insurance did cover the drugs, getting a doctor to write a prescription was still unlikely — even rare.
“Coverage is very important, but coverage is only part of the story,” Ndumele said.
The study looked at health records from 18,000 patients who had gone to a Johns Hopkins outpatient clinic from January to September 2023.
All had obesity, meaning a body mass index of at least 30, and all had insurance coverage for the medications.
Only 2.3%, however, the researchers found, were prescribed a weight loss drug.
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