The big picture: Blockbuster treatments like Ozempic have been found to lower the risk of everything from Alzheimer’s and addiction, to sleep apnea, seizures and bacterial infections. More potential uses keep surfacing.

• It’s still not clear whether they’re a cure-all, or whether the benefits come from the fact that obesity and diabetes give rise to so many other health problems.

State of play: The injectable drugs’ potential beyond weight loss was driven home early this year by a study of almost 2 million Veterans Health Administration patient records that found GLP-1s lowered the likelihood of dozens of health conditions.

• Researchers found the benefits were modest — about a 10% to 20% reduction in most cases — but noted that could be meaningful, especially for conditions like dementia that have few effective treatments.

Friction point: The FDA has only approved GLP-1s for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart risk and, under certain circumstances, sleep apnea. That means using them for any other condition is “off label” and at a physician’s discretion.

• The designation can affect whether insurers pay for the treatments. That’s no small matter when the monthly cost of brand-name options like Wegovy and Zepbound range from $1,000 to $1,350 without coverage.
• The hype around the drugs has sent many Americans to telemedicine companies that sell brand-name or knockoff GLP-1s. One recent study found that nearly 40% of GLP-1s approved by the FDA for diabetes are being prescribed off-label.

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Full-body MRIs offer peace of mind and pitfalls

By Carly Mallenbaum

Why it matters: Scans from companies like Prenuvo and Ezra have become a popular health splurge for adults focused on longevity.

• That’s largely thanks to wellness influencers, celebrity endorsements and a distrust of the conventional medical system.

By the numbers: Prenuvo has completed 50,000 scans since December — and 150,000 total since 2018, CEO Andrew Lacy tells Axios.

What they found: Prenuvo scans spotted cancer in 2.2% of mostly asymptomatic patients, according to an ongoing study conducted by the MRI company and presented at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in April.

• Roughly half of the biopsies prompted by scan findings turned out to reveal cancer.

Between the lines: Just because a scan detected cancer, that doesn’t mean the cancer was aggressive or that the detection extended someone’s lifespan.

• In the study, two breast cancer cases were not detected by a whole-body MRI.

What we’re hearing: Full-body scans are “the bane of my existence,” says oncologist Marleen Meyers, director of NYU Langone’s survivorship program at the Perlmutter Cancer Center.

• She says that most findings from full-body MRIs are false positives or benign, but “the knowledge, the stress and fact you start treatment then upends your life.”