(Robin Foster – HealthDay News) – Have you seen others lose weight in a matter of weeks after taking one of the new blockbuster weight loss drugs, so you decide to try one of the drugs yourself, only to discover that the needle on the bathroom scale barely moves?
Because? New research presented Monday at the conference of the Digestive Diseases Week in Washington, DC, suggests that genes could be at play.
Some patients will lose 20% or more of their body weightbut one study found that approximately 1 in 7 People who used the GLP-1 agonist semaglutide for more than a year did not lose at least 5% of its initial weight.
Now, research shows that a new test that assigns a genetic risk score to patients may be able to detect who is most likely to have success with injected weight-loss drugs.
The proof, MyPhenomewas developed by researchers from the Mayo Clinic and licensed last year by a company they founded called Phenomix Sciences. It costs $350 and must be ordered by a health care provider, he reported. cnn.
“Our data supports that obesity has a strong genetic and biological basis that varies in patients living with obesity,” lead researcher Dr. María Daniela Hurtado Andrade said in a company press release. “Furthermore, our results underscore the potential of individualizing therapy to improve outcomes that will ultimately translate into better health.”
“We believe that the test will be able to explain who will be able to lose weight, and we can predict with 95% accuracy who will lose more than 5% with this genetic test“Dr. Andrés Acosta, a gastroenterologist and researcher at the Mayo Clinic who helped develop the test, told CNN. He is also president of Phenomix.
Be able to Predicting success, or the likelihood of failure, could save time and money: These medications are not cheap, and they are not always covered by insurance, or could have a high copay, Acosta noted.
It looks for 6,000 changes in 22 genes in the GLP-1 hormone signaling pathway, and assigns each person a score that classifies them as “hungry gut” positive or “hungry gut” negative.
The people that have positive gut hunger have normal responses to hormonal signaling in the brain, the researchers said. Meanwhile, people who have Negative gut hunger do not respond as well to hormonal signals from the stomach which tell the brain that it is time to stop eating.
Acosta says the test classifies these people as people with a hungry brainand may require different types of interventions to lose weight, such as weight loss surgery.
In the recent small study of 84 people enrolled in a weight loss registry at the Mayo Clinic, researchers performed the test on stored blood or saliva samples.
After a year, people who had positive gut hunger lost an average of 19% of their starting weight while taking semaglutide, almost double the 10% of body weight lost by people who had negative gut hunger.
Importantly, the new research has not been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, so the findings are considered preliminary.
“We need to test them in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that we have done for other drugs. That is the highest gold standard,” Acosta said.
“But at this point, we can say that these results were in patients who were blind to the results as well as the research,” he added, meaning that the patients did not know whether they had positive gut hunger or negative gut hunger while using the medicine.
More information. The Obesity Medicine Association has more information about weight loss medications.
SOURCE: Phenomix Sciences, press release, May 20, 2024; cnn
*Robin Foster HealthDay Reporters ©The New York Times 2024
