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Unlike scores of people who scrambled for the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight in recent years, Danielle Griffin had no trouble getting them.
The 38-year-old information technology worker from New Mexico had a prescription. Her pharmacy had the drugs in stock. And her health insurance covered all but $25 to $50 of the monthly cost.
For Griffin, the hardest part of using the new drugs wasn’t access. It was finding out that the much-hyped medications didn’t really work for her.
“I kept hearing about how it was a miracle drug and it was helping so many people,” said Griffin. “And I’m like, ‘what am I doing wrong?’ So it was very disheartening.”
In clinical trials, most participants taking Wegovy or Mounjaro to treat obesity lost an average of 15% to 22% of their body weight—up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But roughly 10% to 15% of patients in those trials were “nonresponders” who lost less than 5% of their body weight.
Now that millions of people have used the drugs, several obesity experts told The Associated Press that perhaps 20% of patients—as many as 1 in 5—may not respond well to the medications. It’s a little-known consequence of the obesity drug boom, according to doctors who caution eager patients not to expect one-size-fits-all results.
“When people go into this process starting a medication that they anticipate is going to, you know, be the answer, it can be so frustrating when that medication doesn’t work for them,” said Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of the obesity treatment company FlyteHealth.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.