VIDEO: Achieving weight loss goals in obesity may depend on the right intervention strategy

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So the current treatment options for obesity include a range of treatments that go from lifestyle intervention and behavioral intervention all the way through to surgical intervention. And generally these days, the way we think about obesity treatment is that we want to find the right treatment in the combinations of treatments for the patient to get the desired treatment response. So, for some people who need to lose five to 10%, then one type of treatment strategies will help to achieve that target. Someone who has a larger volume of weight loss to achieve, say, 25 to 35% of their initial body weight might require multiple strategies in combination or in some sequence in order to achieve their weight loss goals. So, lifestyle therapy involves working with, usually a multidisciplinary team, so dietician, to provide nutrition support, exercise therapist or physiologist, exercise trainers to help with physical activity planning, behavioral health specialist or coaching to help with goal setting and rethinking how we approach our food treatment responses or how we think about food. And then a medical provider who can help to oversee dietary strategy and the physical activity strategy and help to tailor those things to meet your medical and health goals. And then you progress from there into pharmacotherapy.

And we have a number of exciting new things happening in the pharmacotherapy space as people, I'm sure, are well aware of with the introduction of semaglutide and tirzepatide lately. So, pharmacotherapy does a few different things for our patients. It increases the number of people who get a treatment response, who can actually lose clinically meaningful weight, increases the proportion of people. So, that's number one, increases the duration of the treatment response. So, as long as you're taking the medication, what we see is that people who are responding will continue to get that response and then it increases the magnitude of the treatment response. So, this is in relation to lifestyle alone.

If you add medication to that, you tend to see anywhere from additional three to 5% weight reduction above what you get with lifestyle alone up to but the newer meds, you know, in the range of 15 to 20% additional weight reduction. So, there's real impact that medication has on treatment response. And then surgery, we have a number of different types of surgical treatment options from Roux-en-Y gastric bypass to what is most popular is the sleeve gastrectomy. And surgery really helps by helping to- sort of change the gut-brain connection and how the gut hormones interact with the brain to help signal fullness and help to change how we metabolize energy, so that we go for fat stores that decrease the amount of glucose that we're producing and it helps to improve insulin sensitivity.

So, those are the treatment options in a very sort of broad way that we have for obesity.