Reuters
Forty percent of patients who filled a prescription for Novo Nordisk's Wegovy to treat obesity in 2021 or 2022 were still taking it a year later, more than three times the rate of adherence with older medicines, according to an analysis of medical records and insurance claims data. Only 13% of patients who started taking Contrave from Orexigen Therapeutics and 10% of those who started on Qsymia from Vivus between 2015 and 2022 were still filling their prescriptions a year later, researchers reported on Wednesday in the journal Obesity. The findings involved 1,911 adults, 25% of whom received Wegovy, which belongs to a new class of anti-obesity medications known as GLP-1 agonists originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes.