Doctors concerned about drugmakers testing Ozempic-like injections on six-year-olds

Many children already take injectable weight loss drugs like Ozempic, and the company behind the successful weight loss drugs now wants to expand its children's market.

Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, boasts in a new study that one of its drugs can help lower the body mass index (BMI) of children between the ages of 6 and 12.

Published in New England Journal of MedicineThis latest pharmaceutical company-sponsored study focuses on liraglutide, the active ingredient in the drug Saxenda. Like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound, liraglutide belongs to the class of drugs known as GLP-1, which appear to mimic the feeling of fullness in the stomach.

In addition to participating in lifestyle coaching sessions with their parents, the study's 82 children whose BMI met the cutoff point for obesity received daily injections of either the active drug or a placebo for about 13 months.

This study, conducted by an international group of medical researchers, concluded that the BMI of children who received the drug liraglutide decreased by an average of 5.8 percent, compared with 1.6 percent of children who received the placebo.

Although childhood obesity is indeed a risk factor for health problems in both adolescence and adulthood, some physicians fear that giving powerful and relatively new drugs such as GLP-1 to children of this age could do more harm than good.

“We don't know the long-term efficacy and safety of these drugs in children,” Roy Kim, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said in an interview with NBC“Although the drug was well tolerated, there are concerns about this class of drugs and potential problems with the pancreas, thyroid cancer risk, and bone health over the course of a lifetime.”

Because these drugs have been shown to reduce or suppress appetite, Sarah Armstrong, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University, points out that giving these drugs to children can also pose developmental risks.

“What happens to children if you give them drugs that reduce their hunger while they're growing?” wondered Armstrong, who also helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. “Will their puberty start be delayed? Will their growth be delayed? Will it affect their bone density? Will they develop eating disorders that lead to other problems later in life?”

Although both doctors said the results of this small study could be useful in considering treatment options for children with severe obesity, particularly in preventing comorbidities, it is nevertheless telling that even experts who are not fundamentally opposed to GLP-1 or its use in children have such concerns.

So far, the FDA has not approved any GLP-1 drugs for children under 12. If the agency considers this, the public will know a lot more about the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for children – and hopefully these studies will not be funded by the companies that make big money from the sales of the drugs.

More about weight loss injections: Eli Lilly offers significantly cheaper Zepbound if you are willing to buy your own syringes