Semaglutides and the next public health revolution

 It is hard to overstate the transformational public health benefits of anti-hypertensives and statins for blood pressure and serum cholesterol control. For a modest cost, these drugs not only mitigate human suffering but save billions, if not trillions, of dollars by avoiding costly surgical interventions.

The repurposing of anti-diabetic drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide for weight loss in obese populations promises to be similarly transformative. I’ve witnessed this anecdotally; one of my sisters lost 90 lbs in 2.5 years on semaglutide, and for the first time in decades has a BMI in the healthy range.

“The need for the medications is undeniable. Obesity is a major contributor to preventable death in the U.S. It can lead to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, several forms of cancer, mental illness, difficulty with physical function, kidney failure, and many other maladies. It is stubbornly resistant to behavioral and dietary changes in many people.

“Obesity and its myriad consequences cost the healthcare system a quarter trillion dollars in 2020. An economic/demographic microsimulation from the USC Schaeffer Center estimates that the cumulative social benefits from solving obesity (e.g., zero obesity rate) would reach almost $1 trillion over the next 10 years, or roughly $100 billion per year. Savings to Medicare alone could be as much as $245 billion in the first 10 years of coverage.

“But the benefits and savings don’t stop there.

“Over 20 years, a period in which we can likely expect both the launch of oral GLP-1s and their eventual genericization, the prices of these medicines would likely spiral down by 80% or more and savings would compound spectacularly. Indeed, calculations based on the Schaeffer model show that the U.S. healthcare system would save $7 trillion over 30 years, on top of all the benefits due to improved quality of life and productivity.”

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/107432?xid=nl_secondopinion_2023-11-19&eun=g1700464d0r

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more