[anovikov]

I was going to comment that "tirzerpatide study for apnea is bullshit because it's just weight loss which causes apnea so naturally it works just like any other method of weight loss would" but apparently NOT, and it helps, somehow, beyond the effect that a simple weight loss of the same magnitude would have!

>pharmaceutical companies very carefully choose that subclass in an attempt to help ensure the clinical trials are successful

You mean that they mainly choose middle class white males with degrees? It's not some racism, it's just an observation (which one may call a clinical meta-study of a sort), that this is the group that follows doctor's advice best of all thus making results the least noisy. Which in turns makes trials many times cheaper because doing otherwise would have required much larger patient groups to compensate for higher noise.

Going beyond that will be many *-isms at once, but google it up.

This is a major factor impacting quality of drugs. For instance, GLP-1 itself should be probably prescribed to Blacks starting with lower threshold BMI because they appear to benefit more from it in 27-30 BMI range, and are more susceptible to weight-related health issues than whites in these "overweight" ranges, and more likely to develop diabetes from it, and overall. Doing so would have increased overall society's benefits from GLP-1 a lot. But no one knows for sure because clinical trials almost didn't include them.