Study shows costly weight loss drug may also cut risks of heart attacks

Dr. Michael Blaha:

If you stop taking these medications, patients do regain weight. At least most of them are regaining weight, maybe not all the weight, but much of the weight.

So it’s really shifting the thinking about obesity towards that of a chronic disease. We take blood pressure medications for hypertension, and we expect that our blood pressure will go back if we stop them, and same with our cholesterol medications. We sort of assume that, if you stopped taking them, the cholesterol will go up.

But this hasn’t really been worked out so much in the obesity space. But as we learn more about the disease and think of it as a chronic disease, it sort of makes sense then that the medications need to be there to exert their effect.

So we hopefully will learn a lot more about the maintenance phase of pharmacologic treatment for obesity over time. But, right now, it looks like you do need to stay on the drug to get the maximum benefit. Now, of course, in the meantime, we’d like our patients to have thorough diet and lifestyle changes that might help them keep the weight off.

So it’s really, once again, diet, exercise and the drugs.