Are GLP-1 Drugs "the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of the 21st Century"?

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the past few years, we've learned that GLP-1 drugs don’t just help with diabetes or increase people’s feelings of fullness to help them lose weight. They have broad effects on substance abuse and behavior. They even seem to help with otherwise incurable illnesses, like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. This month, a team of scientists studying 2 million patients in the Veterans Affairs medical system found that GLP-1s were associated with “a reduced risk of substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neurocognitive disorders (including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia), coagulation disorders (clotting), cardiometabolic disorders (like strokes and heart attacks), infectious illnesses and several respiratory conditions.” Today’s guest is a coauthor on the paper, Ziyad Al-Aly. He is a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. We talk about his new paper, the steps he took to make sure his findings were trustworthy, why GLP-1 drugs might work so well, what they’re teaching us about the brain and body, how they’re scrambling our sense of where volition begins and where free will ends, and what scientists should do next with the revelation that these drugs have effects that go far beyond obesity and diabetes. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ziyad Al-Aly Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Al-Aly et al. on the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 drugs [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1:12.8	Shopify.com slash setup. Today, the latest research in the revolution of GLP1 drugs like
1:21.7	Ozempic and why some scientists are calling it the greatest medical breakthrough of the 21st century.
1:29.2	So one of the best stories, most famous stories of great fortune in science history,
1:36.0	happened in the fall of 1928.
1:38.5	When the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was coming back from a long vacation,
1:43.8	Fleming walks into his lab in London.
1:46.0	He's been working with Stephylococcus, a common bacterium that causes common infection.
	...

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