Advancements In Obesity Treatment and How This May Impact Cancer In The Future

John M. Burke, MD, of Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, examines how new obesity treatments, such as GLP-1 agonists, might influence future cancer rates. Highlighting a study from JAMA Network Open, he discusses the effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists on obesity-related cancers, comparing them with traditional treatments like insulin and metformin, and considers the implications for cancer prevention.

Transcription:

00:09 | Since we know that all these complications regarding obesity can be improved by some of these medications, what about cancer? That was the subject of an interesting paper that I saw published in JAMA Network Open,1 which is a [study] with some limitations. What the authors did in this study was use a database of electronic health records, and they identified more than a million patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

00:44 | What the [study researchers] did was they compared the rates of obesity-related cancers in patients who were treated with the GLP-1 receptor agonists—which stands for glucagon-like peptide 1—with those who were also treated with insulins and those who are treated with metformin. The key end point was determining what the cancer rate was with the GLP-1 receptor agonist vs those receiving only insulin treatment.

01:12 | The finding was that most of the cancers had a reduced incidence in those treated with GLP-1 receptor agonist, with the 3 exceptions of the 13 [cancer types] being gastric, postmenopausal breast, and thyroid. This suggests that the improved weight loss achieved by these medications is going to reduce the incidence of cancer in the remaining [13] cancers. The other exception was kidney cancer. They found an increased risk of kidney cancer when comparing GLP-1 receptor agonist with metformin.

01:50 | As a general rule from this study, it would appear that there may be some reduction in the risk of malignancies with use of these medications. I will point out, I do not think this is the be all, end all study. This is a retrospective observational trial looking at electronic health records with all the associated limitations of that study design, but it does generate the hypothesis and confirms what one might suspect, which is that these new weight loss medications may have a positive impact on the incidence of cancer, and so we will see.

02:32 | Maybe those predictions of half of our patients becoming obese by 2030 will be … wrong, and maybe that will also translate into a reduction in the incidence of cancer. I thought this was an interesting study, and certainly more will come on that topic. I am sure.

REFERENCE

Wang L, Xu R, Kaelber DC, Berger NA. Glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists and 13 obesity-associated cancers in patients with type 2 diabetes. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(7):e2421305. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.21305