Meet the teens who lost weight with drugs like Ozempic

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by asia grace

Deanna Buckley wanted her daughter Demi to host the fair. shot Happily.

The Michigan girl, who weighed about 200 pounds by the age of 15, was being bullied.

And despite being a high school athlete sweating it out on the basketball, cheer, and volleyball teams, she just couldn’t shake the weight off.

“I looked in the mirror and cried,” Demi, now 16, told the Post. “She really hated her body,” she said.

But in March 2023, like other teens facing similar weight loss issues, Demi found supportive solace in syringes.

In January of that year, the Food and Drug Administration approved semaglutide, a once-weekly diabetes drug classified as a GLP-1 receptor agonist, for use in obese youth ages 12 and older.

Semaglutide is the active ingredient in both Wegovy and Ozempic. However, the latter has not yet been approved by the FDA for weight loss in people under 18 years of age. Ozempic, like the similarly popular weight loss drug Munjaro, is a type 2 diabetes treatment that also helps users lose weight. Wegovy is approved for weight loss management only.

Deanna, who once weighed 366 pounds and has now lost 150 pounds with Munjaro’s help, believes a similar shot would do wonders for her own suffering offspring. was.

Things got even worse when Demi fell into depression and developed an eating disorder. Then the self-harm started.

For Deanna, who was worried, that’s when the spending stopped.

“We asked the doctor to put Demi on Wegoby,” said the 50-year-old mother of two. She said, “My doctor was a little hesitant at first, but I told her that if this drug was available to me as a teenager, the whole world would be.” Ta. ”

Pediatric surgeon Atsushi Tashiro told the Post that more parents of overweight children could consider following in their footsteps when it comes to the transformative jab.

“Anti-obesity drugs not only reduce weight, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, but also help reduce a patient’s risk of heart disease and kidney disease,” say experts at the Youth Healthy Weight Program at New York University Langone. , Tashiro said.

He acknowledged that the shot has some side effects, including nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. However, Tashiro says patients with a family history of thyroid cancer or pancreatitis are at higher risk of developing more serious complications from the injection.

“In addition to diet and exercise, there are many options that parents and adolescents can consider for weight loss, including these medications,” he said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees.

A January 2023 report recommends anti-obesity drug therapy to improve weight loss outcomes in children aged 12 to 17 years. Just a few months later, in May, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that 45% of clinically obese teens lost weight while taking semaglutide.

In her mid-March obesity feature, Oprah Winfrey spotlighted 16-year-old Maggie Irvey, who lost 80 pounds using Victoza, a weight-loss injection for children.

Kylie Wood, a Buffalo, New York, mother, said her 12-year-old daughter, Natalie, has had similar success, losing 50 pounds since starting Wigobee therapy in October.