In the weeks around the 2026 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, my phone kept buzzing with alerts about GLP-1 drugs and cancer. The headlines were everywhere – from NPR and The Washington Post to Substack and heated exchanges on social media – all circling the same claim: Ozempic might lower the risk of cancer.
Behind those headlines is a real wave of studies, involving millions of patients. I’m a physician and clinical epidemiologist, and my team and I design and interpret these same kinds of studies that test what widely used drugs actually do.
