According to study, obesity among American adults decreased somewhat last year, marking the first decline in the nation’s obesity rate in almost ten years.
The authors of the study speculate that the recent surge in popular weight-loss medications like Ozempic may be partly to blame.
The South had the worst decline, especially among women and individuals aged 66 to 75, according to the results, which were released Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum.
More than 16.7 million persons from various geographic areas, age groups, sexes, races, and ethnicities had their body mass index measurements examined in this study between 2013 and 2023. Electronic health records were used to collect BMI values, a common but constrained method of estimating obesity as a ratio of weight to height.
The frequency of adult obesity in the United States dropped from 46% in 2022 to 45.6% in 2023, according to the study. (Those percentages are somewhat higher than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s prediction, which states that between 2021 and 2023, about 40% of American adults were obese.)
According to Benjamin Rader, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and one of the study’s authors, the findings varied depending on the demographics and geographical areas.
“Overall, obesity was declining in the United States, with the South leading the way, but in some areas that wasn’t the case,” he stated. “Obesity rates among Asian Americans increased, while those among Black Americans also saw significant declines.”
According to Rader, the researchers’ study of insurance claims revealed that the South had the largest recorded per-capita uptake of weight reduction medications, making the drop there noteworthy. However, he admitted that more research is necessary to rule out any potential relationship.
The authors of the study also pointed out that the total results may have been impacted by the abnormally high incidence of Covid-19 fatalities among obese individuals in the South.
The findings, according to Dr. Michael Weintraub, an endocrinologist and clinical assistant professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, were consistent with new CDC data that indicated a minor decline in the prevalence of adult obesity in the United States during the 2021–2023 period when compared to the years 2017–2020 (although severe obesity increased during that time).
Weintraub, who was not involved in the current study, said, “I find the data exciting, and with the prospect that we could be at the precipice of a shift in this obesity epidemic.” “However, I am hesitant to declare this downward trending value in 2023 a trend just yet.”
Experts stated that further studies over longer time periods are required to assess the new medications’ actual effects, even if weight reduction pills had a significant role in the decrease in obesity.
Dr. Tannaz Moin, an endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, stated, “We know these medications are extremely effective, but we need a couple more years to see if this is truly a trend or if it’s just a little blip and things will go back to where they were, or if it will get even worse.”
Additionally, Moin noted that the current study solely examined the distribution of GLP-1 weight reduction medications, which includes Mounjaro and Ozempic. By lowering a person’s appetite and food consumption, this kind of medicine is used to treat diabetes and obesity. A hormone that might make someone feel full is mimicked by the medications.
However, according to Moin, a more thorough analysis of various medicines might better catch any shifts in patterns, as GLP-1 drugs are only a subset of prescriptions used to treat obesity. Additionally, the cost of weight reduction medications may distort data regarding who can afford the treatment.
Additionally, because the study used insurance claims data, it’s possible that the results did not include those who did not have insurance or who paid cash for weight reduction medications. Moin stated that she was taken aback by the decline in BMI seen in the elderly.
She added that it might be challenging for Medicare beneficiaries to get weight reduction medications, so “that isn’t the group that I would necessarily think to be the highest users of GLP-1 drugs because many would be in the Medicare age range,” she said. A rule recently proposed by the Biden administration would mandate that Medicare and Medicaid pay for weight-loss drugs for anyone seeking treatment for obesity.
Conversely, Weintraub issued a warning that short-term drops don’t usually portend a longer-term one.
“In the past, changes in the prevalence of obesity have deceived us,” he remarked. “We were thrilled when the CDC reported declining rates of childhood obesity in the early 2000s, only to see them soar in the years that followed.”
