If you’ve started taking the injectable weight loss drug Zepbound, a new study says you might have to keep taking it to prevent those pounds from coming back.
Zepbound, which is the brand name for tirzepatide, hit the market earlier this month. Tirzepatide regulates insulin levels and keeps you feeling full longer by slowing digestion. It is also the compound in the diabetes drug Mounjaro.
A recent study sponsored by Zepbound maker Eli Lilly found people who take the drug will, potentially, have to stay on it for the rest of their lives to maintain weight loss.
“We wouldn’t give someone a blood pressure medicine and be like, ‘Great, your blood pressure’s better, you should go off it,’” Dr. Michelle Hauser, obesity medicine director of the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center, told the New York Times. “Somehow people have this magical thinking around obesity, like you’re going to take this drug and it’s going to cause weight loss and just stay that way.”
The study followed 670 overweight and obese people who took tirzepatide for nine months. During that time, the participants lost about 20% of their weight.
Then half were given Zepbound for a year, while the other half got a placebo shot.
Those who got the drug lost an additional 5.5% of their weight, but those on the placebo gained 14% of theirs back, on average.
According to Dr. Louis Aronne, the study’s lead author and director for the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, those who took the placebo also experienced highter blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar than they did while on tirzepatide.
Not everyone is able to stay on the drug for a long time. Dr. Melanie Jay, director of the N.Y.U. Langone Comprehensive Program on Obesity, told the Times that 53 people exited the study because of the side effects: nausea, diarrhea and constipation.
For others, the cost of these injections is prohibitive. The cost of Zepbound, Ozempic and Wegovy is more than $1,000 a month, and insurance often doesn’t cover it.
“If a patient wants to go off the medicine, we’ll try. But we also say what the results are — so far, it seems like most people are going to gain weight back,” Jay told the Times. “And that’s not your fault. That’s because obesity is a disease, and this medicine is helping to address it.”
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