About one in five children in the U.S. is obese. The condition greatly increases the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke and other illnesses. Such dangers partly explain doctors’ interest in helping people avoid excessive weight gain. Recently, many children and teens are turning to a new class of injectable drugs to help them lose weight. And soon they may have another option, too: a mechanical pill to suppress appetite.
However, questions remain about the safety of such weight-loss tips, especially for young people.
Obesity is a complex problem and can have many root causes. These can include poor diet, too little exercise and high levels of stress. Genetics and certain health conditions may also play a role.
“I’m just very concerned about how we’re using these drugs as a quick fix to a complex problem,” says Dan Cooper, MD, a pediatrician. He works at the University of California, Irvine.
However, Lauren Oshman avoids calling these drugs “quick fixes.” A family physician, she teaches at the University of Michigan in Chelsea. More than a decade ago, the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease. But Oshman says some people think some medical conditions “can be treated with medication and some can’t.” Take ADHD (short for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), for example.
Doctors routinely treat it with medication, she explains. “Would we say Adderall is a quick fix [for ADHD]?” Cooper says a bigger issue is how safe the medications being prescribed today to control weight are in both children and adults. Right now, reliable long-term data simply doesn’t exist.
The new treatments are just that: very new. Widespread use in young people In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, approved a new class of drugs for weight loss. They’re known as GLP-1s. (That stands for glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist.) Most people know them by their trade names, such as Wegovy and Ozempic.
Initially, such drugs were only approved for managing diabetes. However, after the FDA’s 2021 decision to use them for weight loss, their use skyrocketed. This was especially true among young people. Some GLP-1s are even approved for children as young as 12.
From 2020 to 2023, prescriptions for these injections in teens and young adults increased nearly sixfold — by 594 percent. That’s according to a June 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Oshman was part of a team that used data from U.S. pharmacies to track how often GLP-1 drugs are now being prescribed to children and teens. The rapid trend of prescribing them to teenagers surprised them.
Their use also skyrocketed among women aged 18 to 25 — up 659 percent. Among men of that age, the increase was not as high — 481 percent.
GLP-1 cheats the hunger meter
These drugs work by mimicking the action of GLP-1. It’s a hormone made by the gut to announce that food is coming and will soon be broken down into sugars that will nourish cells throughout the body.
GLP-1 activates several important actions. It tells the pancreas to make insulin. This is a hormone that will later carry sugars from food into the cells. GLP-1 also lowers levels of glucagon, another hormone; it raises sugar levels in the blood. And in the stomach, GLP-1 delays the emptying of food.
The result: GLP-1 medications cheat our hunger meters, so people now feel fuller for longer on less food. Without the desire to eat more, most people lose weight.
But there is disagreement among doctors about how much they should be prescribed for obesity in children.
“There is a lot of controversy among pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, and physicians in general about how we should treat child obesity,” says Oshman. Ultimately, this medication is not recommended for short-term use. In fact, once people stop taking these drugs, their appetite — and weight — will likely return.
The point is: Many overweight children experience stigma about their weight. And that can lead to a host of other health problems, including mental-health. For these children, many families and doctors may decide that taking GLP-1 medications may be appropriate, at least in the absence of known risks.