GLP-1 use is way up in a key demographic rates are 24x higher than in 2018
This year, the number of US adults on a GLP-1 medication for weight loss reached an astonishing 11% — meaning more than one in 10 adults are on one form or another of the jab.This explosion in use of drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro has happened over a very short time — about five years — despite the drugs being on the market for over two decades.People are on it because it works.Patients lose, on average, 7 to 11% of their starting weight.
There’s also a number of unexpected benefits of being on the drug, from lowering risk of depression and potentially preventing dementia, to lowering risk of cancer, heart attack, and even substance abuse.Still, people are mainly on it to shed pounds — including one demographic in particular, whose use of the drug has skyrocketed from .8% in 2018 to 1.9% in 2025 — a 24-fold increase.They are new mothers, specifically women who get on the drug within six months of giving birth, new research found.This research sheds new light on the larger demographic differences in GLP-1 use.Women use GLP-1s much more than men overall, making up as much as 70% of patients on the drug.Researchers in this new study looked at 1 million births and tracked which moms started on GLP-1s within half a year.
They found that within the group, new moms with type 2 diabetes got the most prescriptions (increasing from 2.3% to 16.9%, or about one in six patients) between 2018 and 2025.But those who had gestational diabetes — temporary diabetes that develops during pregnancy — also increased GLP-1 scripts dramatically, from .4 in 2021 to 2.7% in 2025.Gestational diabetes happens in 5% to 9% of pregnancies in the US and gives a strong indication mom will develop diabetes later in life.As many as 50-70% of women who have gestational diabetes develop type 2 diabetes later.The fastest increase, however, was among women diagnosed as obese or overweight before pregnancy.
Their GLP-1 scripts jumped from from 0.4% in 2021 to 3.9% in 2025 — ...