GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/glp-1-drugs-linked-to-dramatically-lower-death-rates-in-colon-cancer-patients

62•gmays•1h ago

Comments

bicx•46m ago

Maybe I'm just an aging cynic, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to GLP-1s. There have been so many claims of positive benefits that it almost seems too good to be true. With them being so expensive, the producers have every incentive to upsell using any study they can get their hands or money on.

If it's all upside, then I'm happy to be wrong.

bitwize•44m ago

Haven't you been reading Hackernews for the past 10 years? Sugar has been implicated in pretty much every major late-life disease, and the closest thing to a cure before GLP-1 agonists was fasting.

phantasmish•36m ago

… and the mechanism by which GLP-1s cause weight loss is, more or less, by making fasting really easy.

lm28469•19m ago

That's such a lazy and unimaginative take that basically skips 99.999% of human history during which sugar wasn't a problem at all.

pessimizer•17m ago

Hacker News has extreme orthorexia and endorses all sorts of quackery.

robbomacrae•42m ago

There have been some. I've heard about eyesight related issues. A quick google found this article [0] where results showed that people using GLP-1 drugs were 68.6 times more likely to develop certain types of vision problems.

[0]: https://www.aao.org/newsroom/news-releases/detail/do-glp-1-d...

phantasmish•28m ago

A lot of the issues are hydration-related, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the eye ones are, too. Some water intake is from food, so if you eat less, you need to drink more. If you also tend to drink with food, and you’re eating less, you may drink less instead of the more that you need to be. Add in a generally dulled “I crave something” sense and you’ve got a recipe for not just going all day without eating, but also without drinking.

azinman2•18m ago

This is also an extremely rare vision problem. So absolute numbers are very tiny. The absolute numbers for diabetes, weight related problems, etc far dwarf this.

robbomacrae•6m ago

Right. On the whole I think these things are incredible.. looking to try myself after reading here in HN the other day about it working for all sorts of distractions. Just wanted to point out it's not all sunshine and rainbows which would certainly be suspicious.

bpodgursky•41m ago

GLP-1s are just showing what people always knew to be true but was not clinically actionable — most of our health problems come from eating too much and being fat.

Well, now it's actionable. No magic, just adherence.

degamad•3m ago

We don't quite have the data to say "most" yet, but it's certainly looking like "many" is justifiable.

infecto•40m ago

I don’t know. Having listened to a number of interviews with some of the founders in this area of drug research I came away with a much higher respect and significantly less cynicism toward big pharmaceutical. Novo Nordisk is run by a nonprofit even.

gwbas1c•40m ago

Some people stop using it due to personality changes.

matthewdgreen•1m ago

Say more?

helicalmix•39m ago

I think it's totally fair to be skeptical, but it's also not rare to have interventions that are astoundingly effective.

Antibiotics and vaccines may not be completely free lunches, but they're very good at what they do.

piker•38m ago

The fact is though that but-for taking the drugs a lot of the folks that take these things would be long dead before, say, the GLP-1 induced cancer kicked in.

ecshafer•38m ago

GLP-1s have been peescribed for like 20 years, but have been limited more to diabetics and extreme cases. So there is pretty good data. Not to say there isnt going to be side effects in some population sample, but we need to compare that with obesity and diabetes (which is a very bad disease).

OptionOfT•38m ago

Even with an increased risk of mortality, at least right now I can live. The voice in my head that is constantly telling me I'm hungry is quiet.

Without it I'd die sooner anyway.

stavros•5m ago

It's not even "I'm hungry", it's just "must have more food". What a nuisance.

radial_symmetry•35m ago

Most medications have negative side effects because otherwise our bodies would already have whatever changes they make through evolution. My personal theory (based on nothing but my own intuition) is that GLP-1s are an adaptation to the modern world that evolution hasn't caught up with yet.

ammon•28m ago

And we know what the adaptation is: calorie constraint. We evolved in a calorie constrained environment. We don't live in one now. Our set point for desire to eat is clearly too high. None of this means that glp-1 inhibitors don't have other side effects, of course.

lm28469•26m ago

> Most medications have negative side effects because otherwise our bodies would already have whatever changes they make through evolution.

That's not what evolution is, at all

gedy•28m ago

At this point I view the risks/downsides as akin to vaccines. Sure things happen, the overwhelming positives greatly outweigh this.

unsupp0rted•26m ago

Not everything has another shoe to drop.

Getting people to eat more broccoli is almost entirely upside. Sure a handful of people will be allergic or whatever, but on a population level some interventions are just one positive after another, and there's no reason it has to be a deal made with the devil.

cerved•18m ago

Well glp1 doesn't make you want to eat broccoli. Just less in general

daedrdev•11m ago

sure but it definitely makes carbs specifically disgusting in my case

stavros•5m ago

I can confirm that. On GLP-1s (when they worked for me, anyway), I'd routinely think "pizza? Bleh, so fatty, I'd really like some chicken breast with roast potatoes instead right now".

jesse_dot_id•18m ago

Same. I think that pharmaceutical industry is lot more bleak now than it was when Fen-Phen became popular. GLP-1 usage is largely off-label as far as I know, but I wouldn't trust them even if it wasn't. There is a mountain of precedent for these companies to choose profit over health, and for our government(s) to aid them in covering up evidence of negative effects on the latter for the sake of the former.

CyanLite2•11m ago

Its not upside per se, more like avoiding the downsides of diabetes and obesity.

Healthy, non-obese individuals likely aren't seeing these "benefits"... But I'm not a doctor, I just pretend to be one on the Internet.

toomuchtodo•9m ago

Many Americans drive a car every day, even though ~40k people a year die in car accidents. Why? Because the benefits outweigh the risk.

(my partner is on a GLP-1, and lost ~25 lbs in 3 months)

JumpCrisscross•2m ago

> I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to GLP-1s

We know there are downsides. They’re just irrelevant compared to being obese. (Or alcoholic. Or, potentially, overweight.)

It might be a vitamin, where there literally aren’t any downsides. I’m sceptical of that. But to the degree there is mass cognitive bias in respect of GLP-1s, it’s against them. (I suspect these are sour grapes due to the drugs being unreachable for many.)

Willingham•37m ago

Article should be titled: “Weight Loss Improves Survival Rates for Obese Colon Cancer Patients”

brokensegue•6m ago

they don't know that?

infecto•5m ago

You should try reading the article instead of being angry. That’s not at all what it indicated.

agentifysh•36m ago

is there an extract or can you get it from natural food? which have it ?

phantasmish•33m ago

GLP-1 agonists? Well they derived them from a lizard, so, uh… sort of? But no, no foods you eat are really going to have GLP-1 agonists in them, not to any meaningful degree anyway. Plus if you’re eating them they have to survive at least part of the digestive tract, which means you need even more since some of it’ll be lost.

Your body produces GLP-1, but it lives in the blood for like minutes. The innovation was finding a chemical that tickles the same receptors but survives in the body for days at a time.

cstrahan•24m ago

There may be some herbal supplements that impact GLP-1 release to some extent, but what is being talked about here are synthetic GLP-1 receptor agonists.

mrtesthah•21m ago

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...

L-tryptophan > Indole > Raises GLP-1

ck2•35m ago

no GLP-1 generics until 2030

lots of people will miss out on benefits, like oh preventing death

our drug system is weird

exabrial•27m ago

Private people invested a lot of money to develop this and get it through testing. Allowing them to reap the benefits from their investment for a limited time is just fine.

It's not people couldn't also: Diet, exercise, choose veggies, eat more fiber, etc

isoprophlex•24m ago

"Sorry bro gonna let you die because, muh investments, you see"

Your closing remark is overly simplistic and offers a contradiction: if those things would work for these obese people, they wouldn't need GLPs.

exabrial•21m ago

The laws of thermodynamics apply to everyone equally.

asdff•19m ago

Where in thermodynamic principles does it suggest money ought to flow into the pockets of the few?

phantasmish•16m ago

The standard for medical interventions usually isn’t “could it work?” or “should it work?” but “does it work?”

This is why the efficacy of every single contraceptive method isn’t way higher than it is. Lots of them should work almost perfectly… but the harder they are to use correctly, the less effective they in-fact are.

asdff•20m ago

The public also invested a lot of money.

mrtesthah•22m ago

In theory you could supplement with L-tryptophan which is metabolized into indole which then raises GLP-1 production within enteroendocrine cells.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112471...

jl6•27m ago

> However, the study authors emphasize that more research is needed to confirm these mechanisms and determine whether the survival benefit observed in this real-world analysis represents a direct anti-cancer effect or an indirect result of improved metabolic health

Given it’s an observational study, I would bet on the latter. It’s really hard to know you’ve controlled for all confounding factors, and there’s a strong null hypothesis because we know that losing weight can have huge and wide-ranging health benefits.

stavros•7m ago

Yeah, most GLP-1 benefits (or even adverse effects, like muscle loss) seem to be caused by the weight loss. We already knew obesity massively increases risk from a host of diseases, but GLP-1s are still treated with scepticism of the "oh but what about the side-effects we don't know about?!" variety?

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