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New Drug to Stop ‘Ozempic Butt’ Muscle Loss Side Effect of Obesity Jabs
A new drug called apitegromab could help people on obesity jabs avoid unwanted muscle decline that’s been linked to flat bums or “Ozempic butt”, according to research in Nature Medicine journal. Around a third of the weight loss from GLP-1 obesity jabs like Wegovy and Mounjaro can come from muscle rather than fat, the US research suggests.
But in the trial with 102 adults, mostly women, those who took apitegromab with their obesity medication maintained more muscle while still losing fat, body scans showed.
Experts say more evaluation studies are needed though, before recommending it.
People on GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro may experience exaggerated loss of fat, muscle and tissue volume as weight quickly drops. It is thought to be the result of rapid slimming, rather than the medication itself. Obesity jabs curb appetite and make you feel fuller for longer, so you eat much less and shed weight.
U.S. Insurers Back Vaccines Through 2027 as Trump Signs EO on Childhood Immunizations
America’s health insurers have committed to covering routine vaccines through 2027, even as President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week directing federal agencies to reduce the number of recommended childhood immunizations, deepening a stand-off between the insurance industry and the administration over vaccine policy.
AHIP, the national trade organization representing insurers that collectively cover more than 200 million Americans, announced at the end of May that its members will continue covering routine vaccines through 2027, extending a similar commitment made for 2026.
According to a report from The Guardian, the decision came after a federal judge paused controversial changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the body whose recommendations legally require insurers to provide vaccine coverage without cost-sharing.
Is This the End of Costly and Harmful Pharmaceutical Advertising?
For more than two decades, Americans have lived with a peculiar feature of their healthcare system: television commercials in which smiling actors jog through sunlit parks, while a voice rapidly lists side effects ranging from nausea to death. Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising has become so normalized that it is easy to forget how unusual it is globally.
The United States is effectively the only country in the world that allows this practice. Most advanced nations have concluded that prescription drugs are fundamentally different from ordinary consumer products, and that medical decisions should be guided by physicians and evidence — not billion-dollar advertising campaigns designed to manufacture demand. At long last, this expensive and harmful practice may finally be under real political pressure.
Across the country, a new bipartisan skepticism is emerging around the role of pharmaceutical advertising in shaping both healthcare costs and medical decision-making. These efforts are not confined to one ideological camp. They reflect a growing consensus across the left, right, and populist movements that the current system is distorting both medicine and markets.
Wearables, and the Flood of Data They Generate, Inch Closer to Entering the Clinic
A major selling point for wearable devices is the promise that they’ll help identify hidden health conditions before they lead to major harm. But a nagging issue has been the connection to clinician guidance when a smartwatch or ring raises the alarm.
To help address this issue, wearable makers Oura and Whoop recently announced they’ll make it possible for users to connect virtually with doctors directly from their apps. While the move could represent the first step in the long-awaited adoption of consumer health data by traditional clinical care, experts cautioned that the bar for data in clinical decision-making is higher than for simple wellness purposes.
The Food and Drug Administration has only authorized a handful of wearable features for clinical use, and the evidence base for using wearable data to inform medical care is nascent. Widespread use by clinicians will take considerably more work.
“This was an inevitable development,” said Ida Sim, a physician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how to make best use of consumer health data. “We’ve got these sensors that have ostensibly valuable data … but we haven’t even begun to tap into the real clinical value.
This Weight-Loss Drug Hasn’t Been Approved by the FDA. Doctors Are Prescribing It Anyway.
Retatrutide isn’t supposed to be everywhere. Touted as the next generation in the GLP-1 craze, it’s an experimental weight-loss drug that is not authorized outside of clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration hasn’t reviewed whether it is safe and effective, which is the legal path for prescription drugs to come to market. And yet retatrutide is for sale all over the internet, a phenomenon with no modern precedent.
It isn’t just shadowy online vendors offering what they claim to be research-grade retatrutide. A CBS News investigation found dozens of clinics across the country, staffed by licensed physicians and nurse practitioners, openly advertising retatrutide. That practice defies a longstanding norm in medicine — to wait for the FDA to approve a drug before prescribing it — and is contributing to a booming commercial marketplace for a drug that is barred from sale by federal law.
‘World-First’ Vaccine Designed by Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has been used to develop a “fundamentally new” type of vaccine that could protect against large swathes of viruses and prevent pandemics, say researchers.
The team at the University of Cambridge say it is the first time a vaccine’s key component has been designed entirely by AI and then trialled in people.
The vaccine was engineered to work on all coronaviruses which would include all Covid variants as well as viruses that currently infect animals yet have the potential to start the next pandemic.
The work is still in the early stages, but the team is already developing separate vaccines that could tackle flu and Ebola. Vaccines teach our bodies how to spot an infection to increase our chances of fighting it off.
But some viruses are adept at changing their appearance — or mutating — so vaccines can quickly go out of date. It’s why Covid and winter flu vaccines need to be regularly updated.
Have a Thorny Medical Question? Your Doctor May Be Using A.I. For That.
Dr. Nicholas Gavin, an emergency medicine doctor at Mount Sinai in New York City, was working an overnight shift last summer when a patient came in with a puzzling set of symptoms. Within seconds, his three younger colleagues — two medical students and a resident — were consulting a free artificial-intelligence-powered app for physicians, OpenEvidence.
Dr. Gavin soon learned that they were far from outliers. A third of Mount Sinai’s 9,000 doctors were already regular OpenEvidence users, the health system’s executives found out in a meeting last year with the start-up’s leaders. “That was an ‘aha’ moment for our leadership,” said Dr. Gavin, who is also the system’s chief clinical innovation officer.
OpenEvidence’s A.I. app, essentially a chatbot for medicine, has become a viral hit with physicians. Talk to a doctor and chances are he or she uses the app to ask specific medical questions or bounce ideas off it in a diagnostic dialogue.
