A wave of new research and policy developments is reshaping how health system leaders think about GLP-1 medications — from telehealth prescribing gaps to Medicare’s new coverage bridge.
Here are six recent findings:
1. The share of employers covering GLP-1s for both diabetes and weight loss held steady at 36% year over year, while 60% now cover the drugs for diabetes only, up from 55% last year. Among employers covering GLP-1s for weight loss, the drugs made up an average of 11.4% of total annual claims in 2025, up from 10.5% in 2024, and more than a quarter said GLP-1s accounted for over 15% of their claims.
2. Most online sellers of GLP-1s skip real-time clinician interaction before prescribing. In a secret shopper study, a researcher posing as a patient with several weight-related comorbidities sought prescriptions from 49 online sellers. Sites issued a prescription 91.8% of the time, but only 26.5% required a video visit and 6.1% required a phone call. Nine sites prescribed based on an upper-body photo alone despite requiring a full-body photo, two issued compounded prescriptions in five minutes or less, and three sites had the same clinician prescribe to the researcher more than once without recognizing him.
3. The share of U.S. adults currently taking GLP-1s for weight loss climbed to 11% in 2026, up from 3% in 2024, with 15% saying they’ve used the drugs for weight loss at some point. The rise coincides with a drop in U.S. adult obesity to 36.4%, down from a record 39.9% in 2022, and comes just as CMS launched its Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program.
4. An investigational oral GLP-1 delivered up to 11.3% more weight loss than placebo over 36 weeks in a 230-person trial across 38 U.S. sites. Weight loss scaled with dose — 8.2%, 9.8% and 11.3% at the 45, 90 and 120 milligram doses — and showed no signs of plateauing by the end of the double-blind period. Among patients on the highest dose, 86% lost at least 5% of their body weight and 70% lost at least 10%.
5. Semaglutide was linked to slower biological aging in adults with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy. In a post hoc analysis of an 84-person phase 2b trial, semaglutide was associated with slower aging across multiple epigenetic clocks, including PhenoAge, GrimAge V2 and OMICmAge, with about a 9% slower pace of biological aging on the DunedinPACE clock.
6. GLP-1 use was linked to a 48% higher risk of smell and taste disturbances among adults with Type 2 diabetes. The analysis matched 438,474 GLP-1 users with an equal number of nonusers and followed them for up to two years. Smell disturbances were more pronounced than taste changes, with hazard ratios of 1.81 and 1.52, respectively, prompting a call for clinicians to watch for the side effect and for more research into the mechanism.
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