Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock
Topics: Weight loss, Mounjaro, Health
William Morgan
Weight loss treatments have gone from being basically hocus pocus nonsense to genuinely life-changing drugs in just the past few years, with revolutionary GLP-1 agonist drugs like Mounjaro and Wegovy already helping millions to control their appetite.
Our understanding of these groundbreaking drugs and how we can use them to benefit a wide range of health conditions only continues to expand, with major well-funded studies underway into how these semaglutide treatments can be fine tuned to be even more effective.
Researchers from a number of pharmaceutical firms, including Mounjaro manufacturer Eli Lilly, published a study this week that could even see the rise of a new trend in the weight loss sphere - 'musclezempic'.
The researchers found that combining GLP-1 drugs with specific treatments that aid muscle gain can make patients lose even more weight and general fat, while reducing one of the major side effects that people see when they use these medications.
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Losing a large amount of body weight involves a desired reduction in fat levels, but also some of the lean body mass like muscle that helps to keep us toned. This is not a direct side effect of GLP-1 drugs, but all forms of drastic weight loss.
Overall, due to the amount of fat lost, most people will still have a higher ratio of lean body mass to fat after losing a lot of weight. But the major study published in Nature this week found that using semaglutide drugs with a drug called bimagrumab could improve this ratio even further.
Patients who took this drug in combination with a semaglutide also lost an even greater amount of weight than if using GLP-1s by themselves.
The researchers said: “These findings support further development of bimagrumab, alone or in combination with incretin therapy, to achieve optimal weight loss.”
This approach could help obese people, who may have struggled to exercise due to their weight, to gain back their physical functions even faster while undergoing weight loss treatments.
But, what on Earth is bimagrumab? It's not a drug you will have ever seen in a pharmacy, or been prescribed in a hospital.
Bimagrumab is a potentially groundbreaking drug in the world of muscle loss, which has been acquired by Eli Lilly as more studies explore how it interacts with established weight treatments.
It is what is known as a human monoclonal antibody, which basically means that it was made in a lab as a clone of a single immune cell inside our bodies.
As part of the treatment, these specific cloned antibodies are able to shut down a receptor that normally regulates our muscle mass and prevents further growth.
The Nature study found that high doses of bimagrumab and semaglutide resulted in significantly higher reductions in body weight after 48 weeks, with patients in this group losing 20 percent of their mass, while people on just high doses of semaglutide lost 15 percent.
This effect only became more pronounced by week 72, with this combined group losing an astonishing 45.7 percent of their fat on average, in comparison to 27.8 percent for those only being given GLP-1 drugs.
However, while these studies suggest that 'musclezempic' could become a treatment option in the future, this drug combination is still undergoing Phase II trials.
So, you may have to wait a few years before you can take a pill that helps you lose weight and get shredded at the same time.