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About 12% of all U.S. adults have already tried using GLP-1 agonist drugs to control their weight, according to a survey report by three researchers at RAND.
The researchers — Robert Bozick, Shannon D. Donofry and Katherine M. Rancaño — based the report on responses from 8,793 adults ages 18 and older.
Just 26% of the survey participants expressed an interest in using drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound to control their weight.
Half of the survey participants who want to use GLP-1 agonists to lose weight have tried the drugs at least once.
The percentage of participants who said they had tried using the drugs for weight-loss purposes ranged from just 2.5%, for men ages 18 through 29, up to 29%, for women ages 50 through 64.
What it means: Some public health experts have predicted that GLP-1 agonists will soon be part of the U.S. health care infrastructure.
Related: GLP-1s to become key part of health care infrastructure, expert predicts
CBIZ recently estimated that GLP-1 agonists accounted for 17% of 2024 employee pharmacy claims.
The RAND survey results support arguments that GLP-1 agonists are already a U.S. medicine chest staple.
A cloud: The RAND researchers asked about some common, unpleasant side effects of GLP-1 agonists as well as GLP-1 agonist usage.
About 8.8% of the participants who had taken GLP-1 agonists said they had suffered from serious nausea, and 5.4% said they had suffered from serious vomiting.
Those responses could be a sign that the side effect profile of the drugs will start to limit the drugs' popularity, even if prices start to come back down to earth.
The RAND analysts themselves note that the percentage of Americans who have tried the drugs may be about the same now as what KFF found when it conducted a survey on the topic in 2023.
"This finding suggests that overall rates of use in the population have held steady over the past two years," the researchers write.
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