Low-income neighborhoods in U.S. have less access to weight-loss drugs: researchers

NEW YORK, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were supposed to revolutionize the battle against obesity, but evidence showed big economic and racial disparities in access, reported The Washington Post on Monday, citing researchers.

According to the report, Black and Hispanic patients and those with lower incomes in the United States are more likely to suffer from obesity and are at higher risk for Type 2 diabetes. Yet a number of recent analyses found that these populations are less likely to be prescribed the new generation of weight-loss drugs.

Advertisements for the new class of medications make it seem so simple. "A weekly shot to lose weight," beckons one posted last year in the New York subway system. But the reality is that accessing the drugs requires a significant investment of money and time that only some people possess, according to the report.

National studies confirm the disparities in access. Serena Jingchuan Guo at the University of Florida has documented that diabetes patients who are Black in regions seeing a boom in use of the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including New York and Silicon Valley, are half as likely to have access as their White counterparts despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes.

Another analysis, by medical data analytics firm Komodo Health, found that among patients prescribed Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy and Rybelsus in 2021-2022, 65 percent were White while 59 percent of the U.S. population is White.

Yale University researchers who used nationally representative data to examine causes of health disparities found that more than 50 percent of U.S. adults were eligible for semaglutide, the key ingredient in weight-loss drugs. But significantly larger proportions of Black and Hispanic Americans were uninsured, did not have a usual source of care, had low family income or lacked higher education, factors that predict whether someone is on the medication.

The researchers worried about social determinants of health, such as cultural factors, and biased beliefs from doctors "that patients of certain races and ethnicities are less likely to afford, understand, or accept the use of certain classes of medication," said the report, noting that "improving health insurance coverage alone is necessary, but probably not sufficient to eliminate such inequity."