A New Test Predicts Who Will Benefit Most From Weight-Loss Drugs
As popular as the new group of weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound are, not everyone responds to them in the same way.
In a new presentation at the Digestive Disease Week conference in Washington, Mayo Clinic associate professor of medicine Dr. Andres Acosta reported that a genetic test he developed can identify which people are most likely to respond to semaglutide (Wegovy) and which are not.
The test, called MyPhenome, from a company Acosta co-founded called Phenomix, relies on a combination of genetic and other factors to categorize people into different types of weight gain. Acosta identified about two dozen genes linked to obesity, and more than 6,000 variants of these genes, to sort people who struggle with weight gain into four categories:
- Hungry Brain: People never feel full, despite how much they eat
- Hungry Gut: People eat until they are full but then feel hungry again an hour or so later
- Emotional Hungry: Those who eat to cope with emotional issues or to reward themselves, regardless of their physiological signals of hunger
- Slow Burn: People who simply aren’t able to burn calories as quickly as they take them in.
In his latest presentation (the results of which have not yet been published in a journal), Acosta reports that the MyPhenome test for Hungry Gut predicts with 75% accuracy who will respond to semaglutide.
Read more at Time Magazine >>