High street health and beauty giants Boots, Superdrug and ASDA pharmacies are to start selling a weight-loss jab used by celebrities. The fat-loss injection is said to help suppress appetite, and can help people lose weight when used properly and safely.
After being approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), Wegovy will be available on the NHS. It will also be available to buy through mainstream health retailers, though the price is yet to be confirmed, and will be dependent on each store.
Boots says it will be able to offer the full service - prescribing and dispensing the drug. Superdrug say Wegovy is ‘coming soon’ on its website, and ASDA Online Doctor says it will be “available soon” as well. Lloyd's Pharmacy has a page where shoppers can sign up for more information and to register their interest in the injection.
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Here's everything you need to know about the new fat-loss injection:
How does Wegovy work?
“There is a hormone that we all secrete, we release, called GLP-1. This is when you eat – it’s released by the guts, and it works on the pancreas to release insulin, but it also works in the brain to tell you that you’ve had some food and you shouldn’t carry on forever,” explains Dr Babak Ashrafi, clinical lead for service expansion at Asda Online Doctor.
“So it suppresses your appetite, [and] drugs like Wegovy and Saxenda and the others, they are GLP-1 analogues. They chemically look like and act like GLP-1, so it’s adding more of that hormone into your body, and it tells the brain that you’re not hungry anymore, you’ve had enough to eat.”
Wegovy is administered via a single-dose pen injector once a week by the patient themselves. It’s understood that pharmacies can sell four doses at a time and prices haven’t yet been confirmed.
“It has a very long half-life, so that’s why it’s administered once a week – it stays in your system for a long time,” adds Ashrafi. “The half-life is about seven days, and you increase the dose once a month – so for four weeks, you’re on the same dose. It’s a gradual increase, partly so that your body gets used to it, and you reduce the risk of side effects you might get with it.”
Who might benefit from Wegovy?
Nice has issued a draft guidance for semaglutide – also known as Wegovy – recommending it for adults with at least one weight-related condition and a body mass index (BMI) of at least 35. In some cases, those with a BMI of 30 may be able to access the drug.
“Those are the ones we really want to target and help on their weight loss journey, to improve their overall lifestyle goals and their health,” says Ashrafi.
How long you take Wegovy for varies from person to person, and Ashrafi says there’s nothing in the official licensing stipulating a time limit.
“What we advise is that you should be seeing significant weight loss by the time you’re on it for six months. So if you’ve not had five to 10% weight loss by then – which most patients from the studies have done – then it’s probably not the right drug for you, and you should probably come off it and we’ll think about other options you might have.”
According to Nice, people on the weekly injections saw their weight drop by 12% on average after 68 weeks.
What are the side effects?
Ashrafi suggests the side effects are “better” than many other weight loss drugs available.
“There are some gut-related side effects, because the hormone does act on the gut as well,” he says. “Those include nausea, heartburn, constipiation, [but] they tend to get better with time and hydration.
“A lot of people who start these drugs find because their appetite’s reduced, they tend to reduce their fluid intake as well – so some [of the side effects] are related to that.”
He also mentions some other brain-related side effects, “Mainly things like headache and fatigue and so on.
“There’s a potential of low sugar symptoms, because these drugs have been used to reduce sugar – they’re primarily diabetic drugs… So if you’re eating a very small amount of food, then potentially you could feel a bit like your sugar is on the low side, but you can combat that quite easily.”
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