By 2022 roughly one out of every five American adults with type 2 diabetes was already using the well-known group of drugs called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, new data shows. The number of US adults with type 2 diabetes using these drugs climbed to 19.4% that year, according to information from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component, a home survey backed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).Â
Out of the 26.2 million adults who got treatment for type 2 diabetes in 2022, the latest year with available MEPS data, 5.1 million received a GLP-1 medication—dulaglutide, exenatide, liraglutide, semaglutide, or tirzepatide. A large portion of them—41.2%—started the treatment that year. Adults with type 2 diabetes who used GLP-1 drugs in 2022 spent an average of $6684 per person on these medications.
Adults who have both diabetes and obesity (a body mass index of 30 or higher) were more than two times as likely to take one of these drugs compared to adults with diabetes but without obesity. This might link to how popular many GLP-1 drugs are for losing weight. In 2022, people spent $33.9 billion on GLP-1 drugs to treat type 2 diabetes in adults. These numbers were increasing constantly in 2019, after adjusting for inflation using the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. GLP-1 drugs made up 21.6% of all money people were spending on type 2 diabetes treatments in 2022.
GLP-1 drugs are becoming more popular among adults with type 2 diabetes, but their use to treat diabetes compared to weight loss or other reasons is dropping. From 2019 to 2022, the portion of GLP-1 prescriptions that households said were for non-diabetes conditions almost doubled going from 7.3% to 14.3%. This shows that the increase in use by adults with type 2 diabetes isn’t keeping up with the growing use in the general population. A recent KFF survey suggests this trend has continued into 2024.
This has led to big jumps in how much is spent on these treatments. These results also point out one concern, while there’s a lot of talk about covering and using GLP-1 meds to lose weight, the growing use of GLP-1 meds is increasing exponentially how type 2 diabetes is treated in the US and how much it costs.
Reference:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2820308
