Treat your Primary care doc nice and he/she can save you dollars.
We again delay the environmental changes you can make for your longevity 2nd segment for breaking news you can use even faster:
Due to their side effect benefits, I have been over the top (“You get a statin and a GLP-1 , You Get a statin and a GLP-1” etc paroding Oprah’s “YOU Get a Car and YOU Get a car” etc) in praising the use of mini-dose (1.25 mg every week or 2.5 mg every other week) for even people over age 50 who do not need to lose weight.
I feel and the 4YOUngevity scientific advisory board feels, and many of the physicians in Exec Health at the Cleveland Clinic feel that almost everyone over 50 should talk with their doc about starting one of these and a statin as the two decrease risk of, and progression of, heart disease, stroke, dementia, osteoporosis, joint disease, lung disease, kidney disease, and more.
Now come two new articles –one on how to lose more weight and make the GLP-1’s less expensive to use and one on its benefits for substance abuse of almost any type. A review in BMJ found that when folks have been on any weight-loss drug (for around 10 months) and then stop taking it, they returned to their baseline weight in 1.5 to 1.7 years (https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-085304).
That’s pretty discouraging, especially since almost all of my patients want to hit their goal weight, stop the meds, and stay at that goal weight. And nationally, less than 25% of users stay on any GLP-1 for a full year whether they meet their goals or not, many due to cost.. Well, a new study offers a way to have your prescribed routine be more cost effective and even increase your weight loss.
Research published in Obesity (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.70137) reports that taking the medications at the same dose but spaced out to every two weeks allowed participants to retain their weight loss and even lose a bit more. The weight loss individuals reduced-dose schedule of around 36 weeks saw weight reduce from an average of 194 pounds before starting treatment to 163 pounds when they transitioned to the less-frequent dosing. And while taking the meds every two weeks they lost four more pounds.
This may work because it gives your body a chance to vacation for a week from the medication, to reset like you would after a vacation and be ready to go, and thus rbe more effective more after the vacation. While we do not yet know the mechanism, the two week GLP-1 interval worked even better for weight maintenance.
Now, I normally reduce the cost of this to my patients by prescribing a double dose vial (say 2.5 mg of Zepbound) and having them use half of that dose, that is half of the double dose every week so that each prescription lasts two months. Since Lilly require you to renew your prescription every 45 days if it’s prescribed for more than a month, it means your primary care doc has to order the drug all anew for you every two months.
This frequent renewal of your prescription takes obviously extra effort for my patients and for me; so I give my patients my cell phone number, have them call me a week in advance of when seven weeks is up, and I prescribe it again thru Lilly direct. (Thus, being nice to your primary care doc means he or she can cut your costs in half. And with this new prescription, it actually will last four months, that is you double the dose and take half the dose once every two weeks to maintain weight loss once you’ve gotten it there.
We’ll see how this works, but the study implies that this is a way of cutting your cost in a quarter. Thus, the $300 a month would become $75 a month and much more available to everyone, period. (I hope Lilly allows this to continue as it increases their revenue as patients do not stop the medication, the effect is greater, and the patient can afford to take it forever). But there’s even more good news about the GLP-1s and their beneficial side effects.
We blogged about this additional great news over three years ago as we saw this effect in our patients, and now the study has come out and validated what we saw in our own patients and wrote about as another benefit of the GLP-1s (see my prior blogs for side effects).
This new article reports GLP-1 drugs help prevent multiple substance use disorders – and reduce the tragic outcomes they cause. The research team studied the electronic health records of 600,000 U.S. Veterans Affairs patients with diabetes. They “found that those treated with” GLP-1 “medications...were less likely to develop addictions to alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, opioids and other substances than those treated with a different class of drugs.” Among “those already addicted, the GLP-1 drugs were linked to lower risks of hospitalization, overdose and death, according to the study.” (BMJ 2026; 392 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.s417 )
Soon we may (IMHO) do geneomes on all who agree in 5th grade, and if they have one of the genes that predisposes to major addictions, start a low dose GLP-1 regimen befor eaddiciton rears it’s ugly head. (Do not know if such works for phone addictions too).
For more help managing your meds, losing weight and keeping it off and living younger longer, check out 4YOUngevity.com. In the meantime do talk to your primary care doc about therapeutic benefits, and the cost effective way of helping facilitate wellness and longevity thru GLP-1’s. Remember to treat your primary nice for the extra work. And do use some of the saved time and money to do resistance training twice a week –it is mandatory with the GLP-1’s.
Thanks for reading—your in Germany and France for a River cruise doing planks and pushups on the Viking ship, feeling great after TPE in Dallas and the Walker webcast (see LifespanEdge.com), soon to be back in the USA to the Cleveland Clinic to see patients correspondent for the latest in longevity news that you can act on,
Mike Roizen MD FACP