Tirzepatide (or Mounjaro) for Weight Loss: Rapid weight loss but is this lifelong therapy?

hi this is Dr Kathleen hallinan and we are continuing our weight loss Vlog before we get to the sir Mount trial and terzapatide I'm going to give you just basic information on a new website called join mochi.com this is a website to help patients who are looking for a physician who will write for medication to help with weight loss I know a lot of you tell me that you have very difficult time finding a physician so if you are interested in that that is a website down at the bottom there join mochi.com and uh I

have been asked to give some feedback on their website let's go on to the surmount trial and terzapatide this is a brand new therapeutic I will tell you the data is so impressive and then we'll go over what my my caution is for you so what is true's appetite it is two medications in one the first medication we already know about glp-1 receptor agonists this is a class we've used for quite a few years already this is the brand names you would know about are ozempic ribosis Victoza very effective for diabetes and for weight loss

the second therapeutic is really interesting it is it acts at the Gip receptor what does Gip stand for this is a tongue twister are you ready it is glucose dependent insulinotropic polypeptide so we are just going to call it Gip and the receptor for this molecule is found in several places in the body it's found in your brain it's found in your pancreas and it is found in fatty tissue and the mechanics of this receptor are very interesting and very complex so for for right now our understanding is that the molecule that is this component

of terzapatide is in Agonist or it activates it so there are some very interesting characteristics of this and uh more on that later but for the most part this is the data that I'm going to show you from the study this was over only 72 weeks these people lost a lot of weight it approximates the amount of weight loss that we see from surgery now important to know exclusion criteria for this trial where you couldn't have diabetes and you couldn't have a head gastric bypass surgery so these people overall had an average BMI of about

38 so very close to severe severe obesity but in 72 weeks they had on average a 15 weight loss at the five milligram dose a 19 weight loss at the 10 milligram dose and a 20 weight loss at the 15 milligram dose compared to 3 percent with Placebo so this is a tremendously rapid rapid weight loss and I will show you in graph form so you can see this is from the study that was in the New England Journal um the top line here would be the placebo line and then you see German how comparatively

what a dramatic amount of weight loss these people had percent of total body weight at the five milligram 10 milligram and 15 milligram dose the 10 milligram and 15 milligram really are so close together that you might as well just stick with the 10 milligram dose you don't get a whole lot more out of the 15 and then you see over here in bar graph form same idea the gray here is uh the placebo and then these are at the five milligram 10 milligram and 15 milligram doses respectively the percent of body weight lost so

dramatic weight loss very rapid they did put these people on a diet a 500 calorie below their Baseline diet and they did have them exercise on average 150 minutes a week so you know those tried and true things still hold in these studies um but compared to Placebo doing the same thing the weight loss was really impressive now we're going to get to my caution here as with anything I think you have to always exercise a little bit of caution when a new class of drug comes out one of my professors in residency always would

tell us never be the first or the last to use a drug and I think there's a lot of wisdom in that I like to wait about six months after a therapeutic has been out to see what what happens post marketing and what the experience is um and I'll show you this my concern is that in essence once you get on one of these medications such as this you almost seem to have to be on it for life because and we know some of this now for the glp-1 receptor agonists here is just some magnetide

you see that you know the weight loss is dramatic right but as soon as the medication is stopped up goes the weight again it does Plateau out here you know so and you're still um still have net weight loss but I I'm concerned because the speed at which this therapeutic shows causes people to lose weight there certainly may be an equally severe rebound effect and I think there should be a little bit of caution before we jump right in so as with everything you still have to really focus on again keeping a healthy diet lean

proteins vegetables a calorie count of 500 calories roughly less than what you would need to stay on you maintain your weight and again you can use MyFitnessPal or any other way of counting that you you feel comfortable with and then and then activity exercise good good solid aerobic and resistance exercise about 150 minutes a week which is challenging for anyone in a busy lifestyle but I would encourage you to keep up with those and and see how what you think maybe we should give this a little bit of time before jumping into it but it

is really promising really promising data okay so you guys are doing great keep up the good work certainly if you are still having trouble finding a physician near you to help with medications and Therapeutics you can go to the join mochi.com webpage that may be an option for you okay you guys are doing great job thank you