Meg Tirrell

It was like 17,000 people.

They looked at them over four or five years, 20% reduction if you'd already had a heart attack or stroke of having a second one.

And I talked to this one cardiologist who was like, it's the weight, stupid.

Of course it's the weight.

And the thing was, as they looked closer at those data, they found that regardless of how much weight people lost, or maybe even if they didn't lose weight at all,

they still had the benefit in reducing a second heart attack or stroke risk.

I mean, so there was something else going on.

And the same thing has happened in liver disease.

The same thing has happened in chronic kidney disease.

The same thing's happened in heart failure.

It's not just weight loss.

The weight loss is probably helping in some ways.

But so they're doing basic research on this now.

Dr. Daniel Drucker up at the University of Toronto, who's one of the GLP-1 research pioneers, just had this mouse study that came out where they essentially created these mice that don't have GLP-1 receptors in their brain.

and so they couldn't lose weight when given a GLP-1 drug.

But what they found is that they had improved markers of this liver disease.

So they found these cells in the liver that essentially, when stimulated by GLP-1, tamp down on inflammation in the liver, regardless of whether the mites lost any weight.

And so they're finding that these completely weight independent effects of these medicines and they're still trying to understand what is happening and why this is happening.

Inflammation does seem to be a big hypothesis of what is going on.

But then, of course, there's other things like addiction.