For how we live.
Metabolism, weight, nutrition, and chronic disease.
A 411,000-patient claims study found adults on GLP-1 drugs who started oxycodone had more severe constipation and bowel obstruction at 30 days than those starting hydrocodone or tramadol.
Severe dehydration from diarrhoeal disease and sepsis can shut down the kidneys. In a health system with little dialysis, a review argues this is a preventable driver of death that surveillance is missing.
A transcriptomic sub-study of the CALERIE calorie-restriction trial links 151 genes to preserved leg strength during weight loss, independent of how much body mass was lost.
Applied to 411,000 UK Biobank adults, the Edmonton staging system and the Lancet Commission's clinical-obesity model classified severe disease alike but diverged on who counts as early-stage.
Cochrane reviews rate anti-inflammatory painkillers a very effective treatment for menstrual cramps, roughly doubling the odds of good pain relief. Exercise helps too, but on lower-quality evidence.
Kidney disease is usually silent until it is advanced, and most of it traces to diabetes and high blood pressure. Controlling those two, and getting tested, is the highest-yield protection — not kidney superfoods.
An updated Annals review now covers 38 randomised trials and 25,816 people. Tirzepatide leads the marketed drugs at 19.0% placebo-subtracted weight loss; the experimental multiagonists run higher.
A self-reported cross-sectional study of 599 residents found sharp deterioration across every measured dimension of oral health during the war — a neglected corner of the humanitarian-health picture.
Cochrane found composite resin restorations had almost double the failure rate in children's permanent teeth. The FDA does not recommend removing intact amalgam fillings from anyone.
STAREE randomised 9,971 Australians aged 70 and over to atorvastatin or placebo. Cardiovascular events fell by 30%. Death, dementia and persistent disability, taken together, did not move.
SWITCH-SWEDEHEART randomised regions rather than patients. Over 17,095 people, a default prasugrel policy did not lower ischaemic events against ticagrelor, but major bleeding was lower.
A meta-analysis of 14 studies and 7,465 men found little for the conventional semen parameters, and something more consistent for sperm DNA fragmentation.
Twenty-one years of cancer follow-up, multimorbidity data to 2021, and a randomised trial in frail older adults. In each, metformin did not beat placebo. Lifestyle change did.
DANISH-CRT randomised 1,000 patients to electrically targeted or conventional left ventricular lead placement. After nearly four years, death and heart failure admissions were the same.
PRAGUE-26 randomised 558 patients across 11 Czech hospitals. The seven-day composite fell from 6.8% to 0.7%, driven by cardiorespiratory collapse, with no clear bleeding penalty.
PREMIUM tested prasugrel alone against aspirin plus prasugrel in 2,216 STEMI patients in Japan. Monotherapy failed to show noninferiority, and the confidence interval sat above one.
At recommended doses it is one of the best-tolerated painkillers. The liver harm concentrates at high doses, and half of the failure cases are unintentional, often from combining products.
A Lancet review triangulates the evidence linking adiposity to multisystem disease and finds robust trial support in a short list — while an expert panel argues the drugs must be lifelong.
Cochrane found a clinically important 15.2-point pain reduction across 249 trials. A reanalysis excluding trials with fewer than 70 participants put the effect below the threshold that counts as meaningful.
ABYSS and SMART-DECISION together cover 6,238 stable patients. Discontinuation cleared both noninferiority margins, though the authors say the primary endpoint's composition limits what it shows.
US guidelines recommend routine chlamydia and gonorrhea screening for sexually active women under 25 and older women at higher risk. Self-collected swabs match clinician-collected ones closely.
Guidelines have hedged on anticoagulation for people with one stroke risk factor. SINGLE-AF randomised 1,803 patients in South Korea, and the events it counted were very few in both arms.
A meta-analysis of 90,000 people found these diabetes-origin drugs reduced kidney disease progression by 37% and cardiovascular events by 23%, and the benefit was similar in people who did not have diabetes.
A 740,744-child natural experiment tested a decade-old hypothesis that rotavirus vaccine might prevent type 1 diabetes. It found no protective effect — and no evidence of harm either.
WHO and ILO estimate about 17% of workers face hazardous noise. Their review of whether it causes heart disease found only low-certainty signals — one for heart-attack incidence, little for stroke or blood pressure.
ACACIA-HCM met both primary endpoints in symptomatic non-obstructive HCM. The gains were real but small, and one in ten patients had a reversible drop in pumping function.
High urate levels track with worsening kidney disease, so treating them seemed a logical way to slow it. Two trials that lowered urate with allopurinol found the kidneys declined at the same rate anyway.
A pooled analysis puts patient-reported rates at 13.9%, 8.0% and 12.0%. All of it is self-report, the heterogeneity is enormous, and the reviewers stop short of recommending avoidance.
A trial of an anti-inflammatory antibody cut cardiovascular events without changing lipids. A genetic study of 194,418 people found the inflammation marker everyone measures is not itself causal.
In half a million people, weaker grip tracked with higher mortality — a strong marker. But it reads out whole-body strength and health, not a number you move by training your hands.
Matched against DPP-4 inhibitors, GLP-1 users had slightly more diabetic retinopathy and more retinopathy procedures. Vision impairment and blindness did not differ — and the coding for those is poor.
Leisure exercise reliably protects the heart. Physical activity done for a living shows mixed or even adverse associations — and some meta-analyses find higher mortality in men with the most physically demanding jobs.
The American Heart Association said so in 2012. A 2026 synthesis of 19 systematic reviews found most pooled associations negligible in magnitude, and a genetic analysis found no direct causal path.
A 2023 network meta-analysis of 270 trials ranked isometric exercise first for lowering resting blood pressure. Two 2026 analyses, using ambulatory monitoring and a larger trial set, rank it among the weakest.
An updated systematic review of 25 randomised trials found small effects, concentrated in neuropathic pain, alongside moderate to large increases in dizziness, sedation and nausea. Long-term data barely exist.
Comparing US adults vaccinated just before and just after the changeover from the live to the recombinant shingles vaccine, researchers found a 9% lower cardiovascular burden over seven years.
Hospital admissions for food anaphylaxis in the UK rose 5.7% a year for two decades while the case fatality rate fell. The treatment recommendations have almost no randomised evidence behind them.
The equation converting A1c to average glucose was built from 507 people. In carriers of sickle cell trait the reading runs about 0.3 percentage points low for the same measured glucose.
In people who already have kidney disease, cutting salt reduced albuminuria by about 36% and lowered blood pressure. High salt also blunts standard kidney-protecting drugs — though long-term outcome trials are missing.
A Cochrane review found women doing pelvic floor muscle training were eight times more likely to report their stress incontinence cured than untreated women — with the strongest evidence for that one condition.
Global mean intake was 4,278 mg a day in 2021 against a recommended limit under 2,000. A week of low-sodium eating moved blood pressure in most people; a five-year trial of salt substitute cut strokes.
Hepatitis C is usually silent for years and is the reason for much chronic liver disease. A short course of antiviral pills cures more than 95% of cases, which is what changed the screening advice.
A meta-analysis of 116 randomised trials found weight, waist and body fat falling steadily up to 300 minutes a week. In one 24-week trial, 48% of participants compensated by about 308 kcal a day.
Among 17,508 notified cases from 2007 to 2021, 1.49% died of Chagas and 5.83% of other causes — with digestive complications, not cardiac ones, carrying the highest cumulative risk.
Post-bariatric hypoglycemia hits roughly 1 in 12 gastric bypass patients with sudden blood sugar crashes. Avexitide cut severe events by 55% against placebo.
Users were slightly less likely than non-users to attempt suicide in the two to four years after treatment. The FDA's 2005 boxed warning stands, and the analysis cannot explain the direction of the finding.
An umbrella review of the meta-analyses puts the association at RR 1.45. The AUA's guideline treats ED as a risk marker, and classes shockwave, stem cell and PRP therapy as investigational.
Pooling 32 trials, researchers found milk, whey, casein, and soy protein lowered LDL and total cholesterol slightly — but the effect shrank once weaker studies were excluded.
Mice lacking the chaperone GRPEL2 stayed leaner on a high-fat diet and kept better insulin sensitivity — an early mechanistic finding, not a treatment, and so far only in mice.
Cochrane pooled 106 randomised trials in 13,631 people; a phenotype-led update reached 152 studies. The best evidence is feature-by-feature — brimonidine for redness, ivermectin and azelaic acid for pustules.
Low fluid intake is a genuine, well-evidenced stone risk factor. Increasing fluid to produce plenty of urine is the single best-supported way to prevent another stone — better established than any diet tweak.
A Cochrane review of 50 trials found cranberry products lower UTI risk in women with recurrent infections and in children, but no benefit in the elderly, in pregnancy, or in bladder-emptying problems.
A joint AGA and ACG guideline graded ten treatments for chronic constipation. The cheap osmotic laxative and the newest secretagogues sit in the same recommendation tier.
Cochrane found cognitive behavioural therapy cuts the impact of tinnitus by about 11 points on a 100-point scale. Against active audiological care the difference was 5.65 points, below the noticeable threshold.
In one study of 62,685 women, iron deficiency prevalence ranged from 3% to 15% depending on the ferritin threshold. On treatment, a recent trial found alternate-day iron caused fewer side effects than daily dosing.
Sarcopenia got a formal definition and diagnostic cut-offs. The clinical guidelines that followed back resistance exercise strongly — and are far more cautious about protein powders, vitamin D and drugs.
Three 2025 reviews of the same drugs reach three answers: a matched cohort finds less cardiovascular disease on biologics, a network meta-analysis flags one drug as raising events, and 43 trials find nothing.
Observational studies had linked proton pump inhibitors to fractures, dementia, kidney disease and more. A randomised trial collected all of those outcomes and found only enteric infections.
Adding an inhaled steroid to the as-needed inhaler roughly halved severe attacks against a short-acting reliever, at a fraction of the daily steroid exposure that maintenance therapy delivers.
Across 107 cohort studies and 4.8 million people, the protective effect of moderate drinking disappeared once the comparison group stopped including people who had quit because they were ill.
A 2025 review walked through every study of low-dose rapamycin in healthy adults. The immune findings are real, the outcome data do not exist, and the review's own worked example does not add up.
A decade of eardrum repair delivered on Country across nine Queensland communities produced closure rates below metropolitan benchmarks — and a follow-up rate most urban surgical services do not achieve.
FIMPACT enrolled 210 people, assigned them to real surgery, fake surgery or exercise, and followed them to 2023. The gap between operated and pretend-operated groups was 1.5 points on a 100-point scale.
A Nurses' Health Study II analysis estimated 37% of incident reflux symptoms were attributable to five modifiable factors. Body weight was the largest single one, at 19%.
Orforglipron removes the injection from weight-loss medicine — a real change for people who refused one. Supply, cost, and coverage are the harder problems it does not solve.
The IARC calls night shift work probably carcinogenic. A 2026 meta-analysis of nurses shows why 'probably' is careful: the breast cancer signal appears only after decades, and shrinks to nothing once bias is corrected.
An umbrella review graded 249 effect sizes across 67 risk factors for male infertility. More than half were rated very low certainty — and the review contradicts its own table on one of them.
Adding milk, yoghurt and cheese cut hip fractures 46% in Australian aged-care residents. In the general over-50 population, dietary calcium intake shows no association with fracture risk at all.
Observational studies link higher water intake to healthier kidneys. When a randomised trial coached people with kidney disease to drink more, their filtration fell at the same rate as the control group.
A phase 2 trial of dasatinib plus quercetin missed its bone endpoint. A senolytic injected into the eye produced a 5.6-letter vision gain whose confidence interval crosses zero.
Two cohorts published ten days apart. One found the PFAS mixture more than doubling the odds of hypertension at 24 to 28 weeks; the other found lower birth weight, but only in female infants.
A meta-analysis of 45 cohorts found risk rising steadily with every 10 beats per minute. A study of 92,457 wearable users found one person's normal can differ from another's by 70 beats.
One found PFAS mixtures associated with lower kidney filtration, with blood lipids mediating much of it. The other found the lipid association weaker in people with healthier habits.
Cochrane pooled 47 randomised trials in 5,290 women. The drug most often named alongside minoxidil as first-line — spironolactone — had no randomised evidence, and the review asked for some.
A 2,836-pair analysis of the ECHO cohort found one of four compounds associated with parent-reported sleep problems. A Shanghai study of bone density found opposite directions in girls and boys.
OPAL randomised 347 people in Australian primary care and emergency departments. At six weeks the opioid group's mean pain score was slightly worse than the placebo group's.
Across studies, current NSAID use was tied to about a 73% higher odds of acute kidney injury, more in older people and those with existing kidney disease. The combination with two blood-pressure drugs is the real hazard.
ACHIEVE randomised 977 older adults and measured three-year cognitive change. The difference between hearing aids and health education was 0.002 SD units, p=0.96. One subgroup result is doing a lot of work.
Applying the clinical-versus-preclinical obesity framework to 2,316 surgical patients in four countries found two groups near-identical on BMI and different on almost everything else.
In a trial of 1,643 men, prostate cancer killed 3.1% of the monitored group and 2.2% of the surgery group — a difference the trial could not distinguish from chance. Metastases were twice as common.
Its guideline says antipyretics should be considered when a feverish child appears distressed, not to lower a temperature. In critically ill adults, paracetamol for fever changed nothing.
A network meta-analysis of 24 randomised trials ranks oral dutasteride first on 24-week hair density. The adverse-effect literature behind these drugs is separately, and seriously, contested.
Cochrane reviews find honey modestly eases a child's cough and does about as well as dextromethorphan, while OTC cough medicines have not beaten placebo in children. The honey trials excluded infants under one.
Two double-blind crossover studies in people who had put themselves on gluten-free diets failed to reproduce a gluten effect. One found a different wheat carbohydrate did it instead.
Two WHO bodies reported on the same day in July 2023 and reached findings that sound contradictory. Both were right, because they were answering different questions.
In 2023 declining taurine was proposed as a driver of ageing. Two years later the same journal published human, monkey and mouse data in which taurine rose or stayed flat.
That is the 23-year result from the largest randomised trial. A 2026 Cochrane review of 789,086 men rates the mortality benefit moderate-certainty and the harms largely unmeasured.
Feeding studies find that when fructose replaces other carbohydrate at equal calories, liver fat barely moves. The liver damage tracks the extra energy, not the sugar's molecular identity.
PACE randomised patients across 235 primary care centres and found recovery took 17 days on the drug and 16 days on placebo. For osteoarthritis the picture differs, but not flatteringly.
US and UK guidelines converge: a brief seizure during a fever in a young child rarely needs scans or blood tests, and paracetamol and ibuprofen do not stop them recurring.
In the two pivotal dupilumab trials, 36% to 38% reached that endpoint at 16 weeks against 8% to 10% on placebo. A 97-trial network review finds the newer drugs clustered closely together.
Bloating and visible distension are different problems with different mechanisms. The 2025 ESNM/UEG consensus found visceral hypersensitivity, not gas volume, doing most of the work.
The trials that made eye vitamins a standard recommendation enrolled only people who already had substantial disease. In AREDS2, neither omega-3 nor lutein beat placebo on the primary endpoint.
A Cochrane review of six trials found no benefit for the common cold and significantly more adverse effects in adults. Resistant bacterial infections were linked to 4.71 million deaths in 2021.
The label follows people for life, pushes them onto second-line antibiotics, and is associated with higher rates of MRSA and C. difficile. A randomised trial tested a faster way to remove it.
In 555,904 matched adults, screening endoscopy cut gastric cancer mortality in the 50s and 60s. Past 80, or with heavy comorbidity, the association reversed.
A meta-analysis of 16 studies and a daily-temperature cohort agree: tooth eruption brings gum irritation, drooling and fussiness, and at most a slight temperature rise — not a true fever.
Tretinoin beats its own vehicle in randomised trials — though the vehicle does much of the work. In the few head-to-head trials against over-the-counter retinol, both arms improved and tretinoin irritated more.
A generic must prove its absorption matches the brand within a defined statistical window. Across 2,070 FDA studies the average gap was under 5%. Generics are 90% of prescriptions and a fraction of the cost.
A 1,224-person biomonitoring study found four compounds only in firefighter serum. A separate 65-person pilot in Texas asked whether that matters for cognition, and got a partial answer.
The older oral preventives managed 0.44 to 1.4. The larger change is that the new drugs work in people the old ones failed, and are tolerated well enough to stay taken.
A 160-study meta-analysis found real but moderate symptom reductions while patients are on treatment. The evidence for lasting benefit after stopping is much thinner, and rests mainly on grass.
The randomised evidence in older men found a moderate effect on sexual function and none on vitality or walking. A 5,246-man safety trial cleared it on heart attacks and found more fractures.
IARC put bacon in the same category as tobacco in 2015, which says how sure scientists are, not how dangerous it is. The attributable-death figures are three orders of magnitude apart.
A large randomised promotion trial and sibling studies find some real benefits in infancy — fewer gut infections, less eczema — but the sweeping long-term advantages shrink once confounding is accounted for.
Both things are true, and both rest on high-certainty evidence. The phase 3 trial and the meta-analysis that followed it measured different outcomes and reached opposite-sounding conclusions.
MASLD is excess fat in the liver unrelated to alcohol, and about 30% of adults have it. The best-evidenced way to reverse the inflamed form is weight loss — and how much you lose tracks how much the liver recovers.
A parental history of acne carries a pooled odds ratio of 2.91. Dairy carries 1.25, from observational studies with demonstrated publication bias — and diet appears nowhere in the treatment guideline.
A UK Biobank analysis broke ultra-processed food into 37 specific ingredients rather than treating it as one block. Flavours, colourings, sweeteners and sugars carried the signal; processing aids and added fibre did not.
Cochrane's living review of 104 trials rates high-dose atropine and orthokeratology moderate certainty. The low-dose atropine most widely used sits at very low certainty, and two Western trials disagree.
A network meta-analysis found six treatments clearing the clinically important threshold in the short term. It also graded 98.6% of the evidence very low certainty, and found nothing that held up past a year.
Genetic and trial evidence establishes LDL as causal for atherosclerosis. The same kinds of evidence, applied to HDL, found that raising it does not lower heart attack risk.
The FDA's approval bar requires no clinically meaningful difference from the original, and a large switching trial found no loss of control. The savings gap is a market problem, not a safety one.
The FDA's own trials found every chemical filter tested crossing a regulatory threshold after a single application. That threshold triggers safety studies; it is not a finding of toxicity.
Two Cochrane reviews found low- to very low-certainty evidence that floss slightly reduces gum inflammation. Neither found a single trial measuring interproximal decay, the thing flossing is sold to prevent.
The LEAP trial cut peanut allergy in high-risk infants from 13.7% to 1.9%. A second trial found the benefit real but harder to achieve — and only in children who actually ate the food.
The two dominant causes of chronic liver disease are alcohol and metabolic fat. For alcohol, cirrhosis risk climbs exponentially with intake — and in women it was already raised at about one drink a day.
A pooled analysis of 1.72 million people found no link between an egg a day and cardiovascular disease. A pooled analysis of six US cohorts found one. A randomised trial in 140 high-risk adults found neither.
A cluster-randomised trial in Guangzhou cut three-year myopia incidence by 9.1 percentage points with 40 extra minutes outdoors a day. The eye's underlying growth barely changed.
Six randomised trials found no benefit from immediate imaging over usual care. A separate review explains the reason: most of what a scan finds is present in people with no pain at all.
The American College of Gastroenterology suggests a positive diagnostic strategy over a diagnosis of exclusion, with two blood and stool tests doing most of the ruling-out that is actually warranted.
The LEAP trial reversed a generation of avoidance advice. A second trial run in the general population missed its primary endpoint, and the distance between those two results is the part usually left out.
American guidelines call 130/80 stage 1 hypertension. European ones call the same reading elevated blood pressure and not yet disease. The measurement did not change. The label did.
Pooling under 11,000 pregnancies, a meta-analysis found no statistically significant association either way, with the three underlying studies disagreeing on which direction the risk even points.
Tirzepatide topped weight loss at 14.9%. But only subcutaneous semaglutide showed a mortality benefit — and no drug moved the needle on quality of life or kidney failure.
Tirzepatide and semaglutide showed comparable psychiatric risk profiles against each other over two years. Against earlier GLP-1 drugs, semaglutide came out ahead on all three measures.
A registry snapshot of 13,455 adults measures how far the biologic era has moved severe asthma toward remission, and finds the inflammation these drugs target still detectable in most patients.
A Swiss cohort was classified by WHO, NIH and EASO criteria at the same time. The share of people with obesity roughly doubled, and the overweight category shrank to fill the gap.
Gastric bypass patients lost roughly 28% of body weight at three years, against 7-11% for tirzepatide or semaglutide — even among patients who stayed on the drugs continuously for at least a year.
Lilly's oral GLP-1 pill actually lowered liver enzymes on average, and its rate of serious liver-injury criteria matched placebo exactly — six cases in each group, none attributable to the drug.
Pooling 2,906 participants, researchers ranked how antidiabetic drugs affect fat versus lean body mass. Exercise blunted liraglutide's muscle loss; metformin, insulin, and DPP4 inhibitors barely moved either measure.
SYNCHRONIZE-MASLD reports 84.2% of survodutide patients hitting a 30% cut in liver fat at 48 weeks. The trial measured fat on MRI, not fibrosis on biopsy — which is where the harder question still sits.
The association held across most demographic subgroups, but not among Black patients, a gap the study doesn't explain. Two-year follow-up limits what it can say about longer-term risk.
After 12 months, HbA1c was 6.5% among people managed by community health workers versus 7.1% among those referred to clinics. With 103 participants analysed, the confidence interval crosses zero.
A five-year FAERS analysis found both semaglutide and tirzepatide carry disproportionate ketoacidosis signals in people without diabetes, with roughly three-quarters of reported cases requiring hospitalization.
ATTAIN-MAINTAIN tested orforglipron as a maintenance therapy for people who'd already lost weight on tirzepatide or semaglutide. Those on placebo regained roughly half of what the pill preserved.
A Qatar Biobank analysis derived local cut-points and found WHO's standard numbers misclassified more than half of men and nearly half of women in the sample.
Semaglutide showed a sixfold reporting signal for polycystic ovary syndrome and a smaller but real alopecia signal. Dulaglutide and tirzepatide showed lower or no signal for the same reproductive events.
No study has directly compared injectable tirzepatide with the new high-dose oral semaglutide pill. A statistical technique that adjusts across two separate trials estimates the gap.
The PERTH trial is a 60-person pilot, and its outcome was urinary chemistry rather than health. Within those limits it answered a question people keep asking.
Pooling 24 studies out of 133 screened, researchers found hair shedding tied to rapid weight loss more than to the drugs directly — and a pattern that hits women disproportionately.
Integrated risk scores combine polygenic data with conventional risk factors. A readiness review lists what would have to exist first — and separately, 36% of older Australians had no skin check at all last year.
Two 2026 reviews describe the same handover: as the virus recedes, obesity-driven fatty liver disease is moving into the space it occupied — in a population where roughly 40% of screened adults met obesity criteria.
A single-clinic retrospective study in Istanbul followed patients on all three drugs for 36 weeks. The ranking matches what randomized trials have shown — with liraglutide the least tolerated of the three.
In 3,873 middle-aged adults followed with repeated testing, waist-based categories of overweight and obesity showed larger effect sizes than BMI-based ones. The link to actual decline appeared only in men.
A survey-based analysis of the European Health Interview Survey puts a price on Europe's obesity-related hospital use, and finds the strongest single association is not with obesity at all.
A 230-patient survey from one US diabetes center found symptomatic hypoglycemia more than twice as common with adjunctive tirzepatide as with semaglutide, though GI side effects were similar between the two.
Bimagrumab targets fat, not appetite. Paired with semaglutide in 507 adults with obesity, the combination out-performed either drug alone at 48 weeks — with its own separate set of side effects.
ACHIEVE-3 randomised 1,698 people to orforglipron or oral semaglutide for 52 weeks. Orforglipron cut HbA1c more at every dose comparison — and produced more side effects and more dropouts.
SCREESCO randomised Swedish 60-year-olds to colonoscopy, stool testing, or nothing. After a median 4.8 years, overall cancer incidence barely moved; the stage distribution did.
An individual-participant meta-analysis of 123,940 people in 19 double-blind trials tested 66 label-listed harms. Four survived correction — none of them the ones patients hear about most.
A network meta-analysis of 41,084 surgical patients over 60 ranked 52 drug interventions. Dexmedetomidine held up after high-risk trials were excluded; almost nothing changed length of stay or mortality.
A Lancet study across 547,000 adults and 925 infectious diseases finds obesity raises the risk of severe infection across almost every pathogen type. The global estimate rests on modelling, not on the cohorts themselves.
In a 618-person randomized trial, 27.8% of the intervention group met the sustained-remission endpoint at 24 months against 21.2% of comparators. The confidence interval nearly touches no effect.
An Israeli case-control study found an apparent fourfold risk that vanished once the year before diagnosis was excluded. A Nordic study of 17,232 cancers found no association at all.
An Oxford meta-analysis of 37 studies puts average regain at 0.4 kg a month across all weight-management drugs, and 0.8 kg a month for semaglutide and tirzepatide. Almost none of the newer-drug data runs past a year.
The 2025–2030 edition was released January 7. It is the first to name highly processed foods, and the first whose saturated-fat arithmetic does not obviously close.
FDA cleared oral semaglutide 25 mg on 22 December for chronic weight management and cardiovascular risk reduction. Its self-pay price, not its efficacy, is what may distinguish it.
TRIUMPH-4 tested retatrutide in 445 adults with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The weight numbers are striking. So are the discontinuation numbers sitting beside them.
The ADA's 2026 Standards of Care add guidance on individualising obesity-drug dosing, name two eating patterns for type 2 diabetes prevention, and recommend continuous glucose monitoring from diagnosis.
Two November burden analyses put diabetes diagnosed before 40 on an upward path to 2050. In the Americas, Central Latin America carried the highest rates and men carried more of the burden than women.
In ATTAIN-2, the highest dose of the oral GLP-1 pill cut body weight 9.6% over 72 weeks in adults with type 2 diabetes, against 11.2% in the earlier trial of adults without diabetes.
Three papers published on 18 November argue the harm is not one ingredient but the replacement of whole-food diets. The evidence they assemble is strongest for diet quality and weakest where causation is hardest.
Head-to-head in US insurance data, the two drugs showed comparable cardiovascular outcomes and comparable rates of severe gastrointestinal events in type 2 diabetes. Neither study was a trial.
CORE and CORE2 enrolled 1,061 patients with severe hypertriglyceridaemia. The pancreatitis rate ratio was 0.15, but the higher dose came with liver enzyme rises and low platelets.
SURPASS-CN-INS randomised 257 adults at 26 Chinese hospitals. The 10 mg and 15 mg doses performed almost identically against placebo, and diarrhoea affected roughly a third of those on the higher doses.
Carriers of loss-of-function MC4R mutations had lower LDL and triglycerides than UK Biobank controls of similar adiposity, and lower cardiovascular risk. The brain sets body weight and lipids separately.
Pooling individual data from 23,340 people in four trials, empagliflozin cut kidney failure by 34% and slowed eGFR decline by 64% — regardless of how big an initial creatinine rise was expected.
Over 17.4 years, high ultra-processed food intake was linked to a 24% higher colorectal cancer risk overall — and a 58% higher risk for right-sided colon cancer specifically.
A pooled analysis of 72,776 Korean adults found an 11% higher type 2 diabetes risk in the top intake quartile. An updated meta-analysis of 17 cohorts put the dose-response at 10% per 10% of intake.
Two phase 3b trials tested semaglutide 7.2 mg against the approved 2.4 mg dose. The extra weight loss was real but modest, and gastrointestinal side-effects and dysaesthesia rose alongside it.
A French prospective cohort followed adults with rare genetic obesity treated with the MC4R agonist in routine care. Weight fell about 20% in the first year and hunger scores dropped 62%.
Sebetralstat was approved on 3 July for patients aged 12 and older. In its pivotal crossover trial, 76% of attacks treated with the 600 mg dose began to ease within 12 hours, against 49% on placebo.
Dapagliflozin beat placebo on liver histology over 48 weeks in six Chinese hospitals. Weeks later, European regulators recommended the first purpose-built drug for the same disease.