Jan. 24, 2024 – An analysis of health records for people who lost weight while being prescribed drugs like Wegovy, Saxenda, or Ozempic showed that many maintained most of their weight loss or continued to shed pounds within the year after their prescription ended.
The new findings come from an evaluation of health records by researchers from the electronic health record company Epic. They looked at data for people who were prescribed semaglutide, which is the active ingredient in the weight loss drug Wegovy and also is an active ingredient in the diabetes drugs Ozempic and Rybelsus. They also evaluated data for people taking liraglutide, which is the active ingredient in Saxenda. Saxenda is approved to treat diabetes and obesity, and liraglutide is also an ingredient in the diabetes drug Victoza. The study did not identify the specific medicines that the people in the study took other than the active ingredient, and varying dosages could be taken by the patients.
The researchers noted that previous clinical research studies found that many people who lost weight while taking semaglutide did regain weight after stopping treatment.
“Because of this, we aimed to further investigate the effects on weight after discontinuing semaglutide or liraglutide,” the authors wrote.
The Epic team found that among 20,274 people who were prescribed semaglutide and lost at least 5 pounds, about 18% regained all of the weight they had lost within a year of stopping the drug, and some people even added more pounds.
But the new Epic study also showed that 56% of people “either remained around the same weight they were at when stopping the medication or continued to lose additional weight,” the authors wrote. The researchers did not publish an exact figure of how many people maintained their weight loss of 5 pounds of more during the 12 months after stopping the drug, but they did report that more than 1 in 3 people in the study lost at least another pound during that year, and 19% of the people more than doubled their weight loss.
Among the 17,733 people in the study who were prescribed liraglutide and lost at least 5 pounds, about 19% regained all or more of the weight they lost in the year after stopping the drug. The proportion of people who were prescribed liraglutide and later mostly maintained or lost more weight was similar to that of the people who took semaglutide.
The data for the study was collected from some or all of 236 health systems that use the Epic health record software, and included information about people whose estimated end date for taking the drugs was between January 2017 and January 2023, according to the research methodology published by Epic. The people in the study had to have a continuous prescription for at least 90 days, followed by a year of no orders for the drugs. Because the researchers didn’t know exactly when the people in the study stopped taking the drugs, they estimated that date using a calculation based on the number of refills included on the prescription.
