Teens taking weight-loss drugs should be monitored, says UCI Health pediatrician
An organized attempt to study long-term effects is needed if GLP-1 drugs are going to be used in adolescence
November 06, 2024
IN THE NEWS: Thousands of U.S. teenagers are taking popular semaglutide drugs for weight loss despite concerns about their long-term health effects.
UCI Health pediatrician Dr. Dan Cooper worries that because the drugs cause reduced food intake, future growth and development could be affected, leading to bone fractures or osteoporosis. He tells Scientific American that clinicians and researchers should closely monitor teens taking the drugs and that the medications should be just one part of a solution.
“We have this population of children, particularly low-socioeconomic kids, that find themselves in an environment where they become obese, where they don’t have enough physical activity and they don’t have access to enough healthy food. That’s a social and medical problem, and we have to pay as much attention to that as we do to creating new drugs.”
Cooper is the lead author of Unintended Consequences of Glucagon-like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists Medication in Children and Adolescents – A Call to Action, a commentary about the risks of weight-loss drugs for children, including an increased risk of suicidal ideation. It was published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science in August 2023.
Cooper is a pediatrician who sees patients at UCI Health Pediatric Services. He is also a Distinguished Professor of pediatrics at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, the associate director of the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science and interim director of the UC Irvine Institute for Precision Health. Cooper’s research seeks to understand the role of physical activity and exercise in the growth and development of children and adolescents in both health and disease.
Read more
