Doctors are writing far more prescriptions for weight loss injections for grade-school children than they were seven years ago, according to a study of electronic health records covering more than 3.5 million American children. The analysis, published in the journal Pediatrics on September 4, found that the share of children ages 8 to 11 with obesity and without diabetes who received a GLP-1 medication rose 310-fold between 2019 and June 2026.
For parents, the finding lands in an uncomfortable middle ground. The absolute numbers are still small. Across the full study period, NYU Langone Health researchers reported that 0.6 percent of children ages 8 to 11 with obesity received one of these drugs, compared with 0.9 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17. In raw counts, 20,282 younger children were prescribed a GLP-1 over seven and a half years.
