Ozempic to treat Arthritis? Why doctors say obesity drugs could cure a host of chronic illnesses

Is Ozempic able to treat arthritis? Some doctors claim as much.

Many overweight people battle chronic illnesses including rheumatoid arthritis, sleep apnea, fatty liver, and high blood pressure.

These days, some doctors are advising a “obesity first” strategy for handling these problems.

Treating obesity with drugs licensed for that use will help other chronic conditions either improve or go away completely when weight lowers.

Prescription drugs like Wegovy from Novo Nordisk or Zepbound from Eli Lilly, in combination to diet and exercise, let doctors to treat obesity and improve linked diseases with one prescription.

Obesity medicine specialist Dr. Caroline M. Apovian of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston notes to The New York Times, “You get the weight loss, and you’ve treated the high blood pressure, the fatty liver, the diabetes, the high cholesterol, the high triglycerides.”

Patients who follow this approach, according to Dr. Apovian, are happy with the way their bodies and drugs streamline. Patients also typically continue taking their obesity medications, a constancy less seen for prescriptions like statins.

Still, some doctors doubt the “obesity first” campaign.

Critics point out that a doctor mentioning obesity can readily turn off an obese patient. Furthermore costly are obesity medications, even if they could offer unanticipated advantages; more research is therefore necessary to confirm their efficacy.

This contingent emphasizes that treating disorders related to obesity with well-tested medications—available in reasonably priced generic form—is the correct course of action.

Skeptical doctors as well as the creators of these drugs are advocating thorough research to see how well obesity drugs address several diseases.

Results thus seem encouraging thus far.

Many of these favorable effects, according to obesity specialist Dr. Daniel Drucker of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, could result from the medications’ capacity to lower inflammation.

Dr. Drucker notes patients whose crippling rheumatoid arthritis almost disappeared after using Zepbound for obesity.

Wegovy’s use was associated in a clinical trial to enhanced exercise capacity in diabetics with heart failure.
Additionally revealed by researchers are potential benefits of Zepbound for sleep apnea and Ozempic for renal disease battle.