Are Oral Psychiatric Medicines Driving Obesity?

Evidence mounts, even without antipsychotic augmentation

The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily health-themed newsletter. Regular readers have either enjoyed or felt grimly satisfied as I routinely address the adverse effects of psychiatric medications, usually focusing on antipsychotic and benzodiazepine medications. This is not to say these are bad medicines. These are occasionally life-saving medicines. It generally emphasizes the need to balance risks and benefits, And that means acknowledging risks.

We all know obesity is a problem. Many have been content to gloss over the problem of medication-induced weight gain—until it became a real economic problem. The remarkable success of GLP-1 inhibitors in the market, as well as ever-increasing data about their effectiveness and weight gain and diabetes, highlights crucial issues. If there are wildly effective but very expensive drugs for obesity, suddenly, obesity becomes something we need to avoid.

I've written before about the impact of antipsychotic medicines on obesity (in brief: the…