BWeight-loss and diabetes medications may reduce patients’ risk of developing some common types of cancer that are closely linked to obesity, new evidence suggests.
Patients with type 2 diabetes who received drugs known as glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, developed fewer obesity-related cancers than patients who were treated with insulin, according to a study. to study published Friday in Open JAMA Network. But newer drugs have fared no better than metformin, an older diabetes drug with known cancer risk-reducing properties.
The group of drugs analyzed by the study includes Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic, a diabetes treatment. Since the study’s conclusion, two drugs that work in a similar way have been approved for weight loss, Novo’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound.
Novo’s American Depositary Receipts were up 2.2% at 11:40 a.m. Friday in New York. Eli Lilly shares rose 1.6%.
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The study is based on electronic health records from more than 1.6 million patients with type 2 diabetes over 15 years, ending in November 2018. Because this was less than a year after Ozempic was introduced in the U.S., most GLP-1 patients in the study would have taken first-generation drugs such as Novo’s Victoza, said Lindsey Wang, a rising second-year student in Case Western Reserve University’s BS-MD program who did the data analysis.
Still, the study is the latest evidence to suggest that the widely popular diabetes and weight-loss vaccines may have a role in preventing cancer. Additional studies, including those that randomly assign people to take GLP-1 drugs or other treatments, will be needed to establish whether the drugs can actually prevent certain types of cancer.
“Obesity is the tobacco of our age when it comes to cancer risk,” said Arif Kamal, chief patient officer at the American Cancer Society. Kamal said the early evidence on GLP-1 is “convincing.”
The drugs have been used for nearly two decades, but newer, more powerful versions have sent the market soaring. With millions of people taking them now, scientists are starting to discover potential new uses — and some surprising side effects. The drugs have triggered a gold rush for big pharmaceutical companies, with analysts at Goldman Sachs estimating that the obesity market alone could reach $130 billion by the end of the decade.
Cancer Links
Excess body fat is known to increase the risk of developing 13 specific types of cancer, accounting for 40% of all cancer diagnoses in the US. according to to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the JAMA study, patients who were prescribed GLP-1 were almost 50% less likely to develop colon cancer than patients who were treated with insulin alone. GLP-1s have also been associated with a lower risk of developing other tumors of the digestive system, including esophageal cancer, gallbladder cancer and pancreatic cancer.
“This is very significant because generally when you get these types of cancer, the prognosis is poor,” Wang said. She conducted the research under the guidance of Case Western professor Nathan Berger, who died last month at age 83.
In a finding that Wang said surprised researchers, the drugs did not appear to reduce the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer. There was also no impact on thyroid cancer. Patients who took GLP-1 were more likely to develop kidney cancer than those who took metformin.
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However, trying to track associations like these through electronic health records is “very problematic,” said Anne McTiernan, professor of epidemiology at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, who was not part of the research team and reviewed the study results.
“Electronic health records do not accurately portray health conditions other than those for which billing is made,” she said in an email, noting that the study data set did not accurately portray alcohol use and also may have underreported alcohol consumption. number of overweight patients in the study who had a family history of colon polyps.
And the U.S. drug labels for Ozempic and Wegovy carry a warning about thyroid tumors in rodents, saying it is not known whether the drugs cause the tumors in humans.
The European Medicines Agency studied the issue last year, following independent studies to look for pointed to the potential for increased risk of thyroid cancer when people with type 2 diabetes use the drugs, but found no evidence to support a causal association. Other studies reached similar conclusions.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
