This is specifically a study on people with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, which is associated with accelerated aging. Not clear what this would mean for people generally.
> The underlying mechanisms (reduced inflammation, improved fat distribution, better metabolic health) aren't unique to that group
Those are causes, you can't just invert it (again) and call them mechanisms for anti-aging... Those things are side effects of obesity and diseases causing obesity, there is no evidence or reasonable basis here to suggest there would be any "anti-aging" effect in healthy people without those problems.
Similarly "Ozempic shows anti-gravity effect in humans!#11"... assuming you have unhealthy excess fat to lose.
Except the post they responded to specifically called out HIV-associated lipohypertrophy and the post you are responding to pointed out that the issues being tackled are not unique to HIV-associated lipohypertrophy.
More than 70% of Americans are overweight. That's a pretty overwhelming majority. Most of the Western world and significant portions of the Eastern world are trending in the same direction.
The point is that this can be generalized to a whole lot of people, not just those with HIV.
And there are other causes of inflammation besides just being overweight, and the GLP-1s reduce inflammation basically immediately, even with no weight loss.
Not really applicable in humans. Effect is smaller than in mice, and requires some pretty drastic restrictions that aren't exactly pleasant.
The thing with ozempic is that is seems to do several things, most (all?) of them good for us in different ways. We probably just lucked out. It's not the only case - plenty of drugs do incredibly good things with only reasonable side effects. Antibiotics. Ibuprofen. Aspirin. Vitamin D.
A recent example - statins used to be seen as a tradeoff: you get better cardiovascular health, but some hepatotoxicity. Nope, it was wrong - they actually protect your liver. I think the official change came out this year, when I started them a couple of years ago I still found it framed as a side effect.
Ibuprofen ? That's really not something I'd have expected to end up in someone's 'healthy stuff' list. Ibuprofen increases the risk of cardiac event and is a common precipiting factor in renal failure. Most antibiotics also do not do only good things. The list is too long to write here. Side effects profiles change with research and marketing developments, but thinking these drugs are only beneficial is a bit over the top.
Edit: I forgot. Ibuprofen also causes (non trivial) stomach bleeding and increases blood pressure. And many other things too.
I said "reasonable side effects". I was _not_ trying to suggest that drugs have no side effects or need no consideration when taking them. Tylenol can give you a pretty horrifying death if you misuse it.
But this reinforces my main point - if we ended up comparing ozempic with ibuprofen, we definitely lucked out. Considering the benefits it offers it might be worth taken by some people even if it was on the level of chemotherapy.
Ozempic is very recent. Given the volume of prescription, the probability of problematic side-effect in the short-to-medium term indeed seems low. But it sill is too early to say whether ozempic really isn't problematic. Let's hope so.
I really don't understand this skepticism around semaglutide and long-term effects.
One, GLP-1s are not a new class of drug. We have had them in various forms for about two decades now.
Two, the clinical trials have followed the standard sort of schedule as any other medication we release. I don't hear or see all the hand-wringing that these have received over every other medication we develop.
Three, they are analogs to hormones our bodies already produce. They're not some totally alien substance that we have zero understanding of. We modify them to have longer half-lives, bind more strongly/weakly to certain receptors, etc., but it's not like these are significant departures from things our body already handles day in and day out.
Yes, maybe there is something specific to semaglutide or tirzepatide or the newer generations of GLP-1 medications that we don't understand that has some sort of long term effect. But what is the foundation for that worry? Exenatide has not shown any of those concerns in two decades of use. Basically every single health marker that changes when on these drugs changes in (often profoundly!) positive ways. It makes significant positive impact on the cause of the single largest increased in all-cause mortality for the Western world. Newer generations are even more promising - retatutride has shown significant anti-cancer impacts on rodent studies, and mechanistically the pathways it is acting on there work very similarly in humans, so there is strong reason to believe that will carry over. Even the modern generations have a huge list of benefits that take place basically immediately upon beginning to take them, even without significant weight loss, including protection against CVD-related incidents such as heart attacks, strokes, and deaths related to them.
What we know today about all of the positive impact they have, mechanistically how they are doing it, and the data we have on this class of medication being used in general... the side-effects would have to be hugely detrimental and in a way that just doesn't make much sense based on our current understanding.
It's not impossible, of course, but worrying about it seems silly unless your general stance is that you won't take any medication until that specific formulation has been on the market for decades.
> Ibuprofen ? That's really not something I'd have expected to end up in someone's 'healthy stuff' list.
Never knew about the potential stomach bleeds until I took my mother to the hospital earlier this year. Ironically, she was taking Motrin given to her in the same hospital a week earlier.
tylenol is the one that's hepatotoxic (spanish for harmful to the liver) - ibuprofen is nephrotoxic (italian for harmful to the kidney) maybe you are mixing up your very similar painkillers. in kiddos it's common to go back and forth between them for pain control, thusly attenuating specific insult to liver or kidney. then there's aspirin, don't give that to kids, that's a whole thing
I don't think we really need to worry about rare and very rare side-effects. Or if we do, it'd be fair to also start worrying about all of them equally, but that would mean not taking any drugs ever.
If you read "changes in personality" listed as a very rare side effect on the drug's sheet (which yes, you should read once when you start taking the drug), you can evaluate it, maybe make a mental note etc.
But if you make (or share) a bbc article on a particularly rare side effect, completely out of context, you're privileging the hypothesis. Why this particular side effects should be brought up for consideration? Other than in sounds weird and gets clicks.
Not universally. Pitavastatin has a variety of beneficial effects on mitochondria and seems to have far more minimal impact on the CoQ10 pathway that some statins inhibit.
I've also seen info that i haven't verified that it seems to help with impulse control and executive functioning, so i imagine it would help reduce drug and alcohol consumption as well
People on ozempic certainly look more like the crypt keeper than a younger version of themselves. You lose all that buccal fat that defines your young adult face.
Or that's who you notice. My husband takes ozempic for type 2 diabetes and it completely fixed his blood sugar while causing very moderate weight loss.
What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline that is bad.
Any means of attaining weight loss at a similar rate will tend to do the same thing. Especially if you’re starting from quite-heavy, not just dropping 20lb or something.
Sure. But plenty of seemingly not fat people take it which is when things go awry with the gaunt look imo. Lots of celebs in their 30s 40s 50s with transformed skin on bone faces as a result of this stuff.
I notice it in people who have never been the weight that they're suddenly walking around as, with them it often looks overdone, too thin for their features etc, but in those who have used it to get back to weights where I've seen them before...I didn't guess. They had to tell me.
Losing facial fat will only make you look older if your skin has low elasticity and/or if you lose too much fat, too much fast. Also, it is very common for people that start eating dramatically less to also reduce their water intake too much and become dehydrated.
Besides ensuring you're getting sufficient water, there are a lot of dermatologic procedures that can help you to recover at least some of your skin elasticity. And in more dramatic cases, there's a plethora of options, from fillers to lifting procedures.
It varies. People are often thinner in their twenties than their thirties and forties. If you browse some before and after pictures the ones who have had their skin tighten tend to look younger for that reason alone.
I've always been naturally slim and people my whole life have been telling me I look 10-15 years younger than my actual age... the "Ozempic face" is a totally different look, it makes you look gaunt and dying.
This is just not true, and as I've stated, it's because you've always been skinny.
There's no magic sauce in ozempic that makes you lose more buccal fat than other weight loss methods. That's just not real, it doesn't exist.
When you go from lots of buccal fat to no buccal fat, you will look gaunt in comparison. You've always had low fat so there's no frame of reference, so nobody calls you gaunt.
But, if you gained say 30 pounds, you would look much less gaunt than you currently do.
Either that or you're not as slim as you think you are. At 5'9 a normal BMI sits at 135 pounds for a man - you need to get very thin to have thin cheeks. Its possible you're slim, but not slim enough to have slim cheeks.
Also you lose buccal fat as you age. But ozempic does not age you.
And then of course fat distribution varies person to person. You might be slim but have abnormally large amounts of buccal fat. That can happen, but it doesn't mean that if you got thin via ozempic you'd lose the buccal fat. Again, there's no mechanism for that.
If you still don't believe me, just compare someone thin via ozempic versus someone naturally thin at the exact same weight and height and gender. Notice the buccal fat - the naturally thin person doesn't have more. It just feels that way, because you've never seen them with more buccal fat so the amount they have seems "right". Whereas, for the ozempic person, it seems less.
You're dismissing a claimed observation without evidence. I have no horse in this race but I'll comment that you appear to be attempting to claim that there's no difference between "skinny" and "crypt keeper". That's a preposterous position to take. The various terminology exists because people use it to describe real world differences. For example skinny, gangly, and gaunt aren't the same thing (although there is often significant overlap).
I'm explaining why your claimed observation is bullshit.
And, for the record, you haven't provided any evidence either. You're just "saying your observations".
And, let's all be real here, skinny person to skinny person. Most skinny people are extraordinarily biased against ozempic because they lose moral high ground to people they dislike.
I think a lot of skinny people want to desperately believe they are special or better in some ways than ozempic users. For a lot of them, being skinny is all they have: (
But that's not the case. That's something I'm fine with, I suggest you get there too.
I agree, I'm 46. I dropped from 240lbs in January to 209lbs in June. I have maintained that weight. Recently went to a beach resort for a vacation and the number of random people that commented on my build was embarrassing. From bar tenders making a point of serving me first and asking me how much I benched to the literal wives of other men saying "Hi Vin Diesel" (3 times) in front of their husbands and my wife. I have a shaved head and tan so its going to always be Vin Diesel or the Rock. My wife even commented that people keep staring at me.
I literally realized how amazing life must be for a hot girl.
Must have been because of how disgusting I look...
I think you may be making things up to make yourself feel better friend.