Carrying extra body weight can increase the likelihood of developing certain types of cancer. This has led scientists to consider whether popular medications like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Zepbound might contribute to preventing cancer.
Recent research analyzing 170,000 patient records indicates that U.S. adults with diabetes taking these well-known drugs may have a slightly decreased risk of cancers linked to obesity compared to those using another diabetes drug class not tied to weight reduction.
While this research can’t definitively establish cause and effect, it does suggest an intriguing association that warrants further investigation. More than twelve types of cancer have been linked to obesity.
“This is a call to scientists and clinical investigators to do more work in this area to really prove or disprove this,” said Dr. Ernest Hawk of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in the study.
The findings were released Thursday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be discussed at its annual meeting in Chicago. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was led by Lucas Mavromatis, a medical student at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
“Chronic disease and chronic disease prevention are some of my passions,” said Mavromatis, a former research fellow with an NIH training program.
GLP-1 receptor agonists are injections used to treat diabetes, and some are also approved to treat obesity. They work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They don’t work for everyone and can produce side effects that include nausea and stomach pain.
In the study, researchers analyzed data from 43 U.S. health systems to compare two groups: people with obesity and diabetes who took GLP-1 drugs and other people with the same conditions who took diabetes drugs like sitagliptin. The two groups were equal in size and matched for other characteristics.
After four years, those who took GLP-1 drugs had a 7% lower risk of developing an obesity-related cancer and an 8% lower risk of death from any cause compared to those who took the other type of diabetes drug. There were 2,501 new cases of obesity-related cancer in the GLP-1 group compared to 2,671 cases in the other group.
The effect was evident in women, but not statistically significant in men. The study couldn’t explain that difference, but Mavromatis noted that differences in blood drug concentration, weight loss, metabolism or hormones could be at play.
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