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Amid rising demand for drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro that can lead to significant weight loss, some obesity experts are concerned about the drugs’ costs — both to patients’ finances and to their health.

Speaking at a panel on new obesity treatments at the STAT Breakthrough Summit in San Francisco on Thursday, one expert cited a large clinical trial for Wegovy that showed that about 40% of the weight participants lost was lean mass. Side effects like nausea, vomiting, and a possible link to rare cases of pancreatitis also still plague this newest class of drugs, which imitate the effects of a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP) that helps people feel full.

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“That’s what starvation does. You lose equal amounts of muscle and fat,” said Robert Lustig, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. “If you’re a person 60 years old or over and you’re losing muscle, your risk of dying just went up exponentially. So we may be … robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

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