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One of the big mysteries of popular GLP-1 drugs for weight loss is why some people lose 20% or more of their starting body weight on the drugs, while others barely tip the scales.
one Research found 1 in 7 people who took semaglutide – the approved brand name Wegovy for weight loss – did not lose at least 5% of their starting weight for more than a year, indicating that the drug did not work well. They.
Now, research shows that the answer may lie in people's genes.
A new test that assigns a genetic risk score may help determine whether people are more likely to be successful on injectable weight-loss drugs, according to the study.
“We think the test can explain who is likely to lose weight and we can predict with 95% accuracy who will lose more than 5% with this genetic test,” says gastroenterologist and researcher Dr. Andres Acosta. at the Mayo Clinic, which helped develop the test.
These drugs aren't cheap, Acosta points out. They are not always covered by insurance, and if they are, they can come with high copays. Being able to predict whether the drugs will work can save people a lot of frustration and money.
The trial, Mypenome, was developed by Mayo Clinic researchers and was licensed last year. A company called Phoenomic Science. It costs $350 and must be ordered by a healthcare provider.
It looks for 6,000 changes in 22 genes, located in the signaling pathway for the GLP-1 hormone, and assigns the result to each person as a risk score that classifies them as “hungry gut”-positive or “hungry gut”-negative.
Gut-positive people have a normal response to hormonal signals in the brain, while gut-negative people don't seem to respond to hormonal signals from the stomach telling the brain to stop eating. According to Acosta, the test classifies those people as having a starved brain, and may need different types of interventions to lose weight, such as bariatric surgery.
In a recent small study of 84 people enrolled in the Mayo Clinic Weight Loss Registry, researchers tested pooled blood and saliva samples. After nine months on semaglutide, people classified as fasting gut-positive lost significantly more weight than those who were fasting gut-negative.
After one year, those classified as gut-positive lost an average of 19% of their baseline weight, or nearly double the average of 10% of total body weight in those assigned to the test. Hungry-bowel negative.
The study will be presented Monday at the Digestive Disease Week conference in Washington, DC. It has not been peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, so the conclusions are considered preliminary.
“We need to do these randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials that we've done with other drugs. This is the highest gold standard,” Acosta said.
“But at this point, we can say that these results were blinded patients to see the results as well as the diagnosis,” he added, saying that they did not know whether they were hungry gut-positive or -negative. Using the drug.