Symptom maintenance is just as important
More so than just an issue of controlling a person’s weight, being obese has been proven to put people at a considerably greater risk of developing certain diseases. Two months ago I examined the five most common diseases directly caused by obesity, and here were the results:
- Type 2 diabetes
- Cardiovascular disease
- Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
- Sroke
- Cancer
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One way as an investor that you can potentially put yourself ahead of the curve is to think like a physician. If you were dealing with an obese patient exhibiting one or more of the aforementioned symptoms, the last thing you’d want to do is prescribe a symptom maintenance medication that could possibly cause them to gain even more weight. Therefore, if you dig deeply enough, you can probably locate a few drugs that are poised to outperform.
The immediate standout would be revolutionary new type 2 diabetes treatment Invokana, which the FDA approved in late March. Made by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), Invokana is an SGLT-2 inhibitor that works through a completely different pathway than most glycemic balance-restoring drugs. Rather than focusing its mechanism of action in the pancreas or liver, Invokana works in the kidney to suppress glucose absorption and allow excess glucose to be flushed out in a patient’s urine to maintain glycemic balance.
What’s truly unique about Invokana is that unlike some of the type 2 diabetes treatment currently on the market (not including DPP-4 inhibitors like Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)‘s Januvia) that cause weight gain, Invokana actually caused moderate weight loss and blood pressure improvement in type 2 diabetes patients in trials. Make no mistake about it: Invokana is in no way indicated for weight loss, so let’s not take this extrapolation that far. But if you were a physician prescribing a type 2 diabetes medication to an obese individual, Invokana would be looking like a really smart choice right now.
Another drug I’ve admittedly beaten the table on a few times in recent months that I think has a chance to become a monster is Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) and Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)’s shared LDL-reducing drug, Liptruzet, which the FDA approved in May. Liptruzet is actually a combination of Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE)’s now generic Lipitor, a statin and previously the best-selling drug in the world, with Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK)’s Zetia, which is a cholesterol absorption inhibitor. Not all cholesterol is bad, so what Liptruzet does is focus on low-density lipoproteins, the bad kind, in an effort to lower your chances of having a heart attack, a stroke, or developing heart disease.
In individual trials, Lipitor reduced LDL levels by 37% to 54% — a respectable figure that easily explains why it’s racked up $131 billion in sales over its lifetime. Zetia, by contrast, reduced LDL levels by only 20%. Combining the two, however, into Liptruzet caused LDL reduction to spike to 53% to 61%. This drug looks like a solid long-term solution to controlling primary or mixed hyperlipidemia.
A lot of work awaits
As this data shows, clearly a lot of work still needs to be done to get through to baby boomers about the seriousness of rising obesity rates. The problem is that obesity isn’t just an individual issue — it has the potential to affect your friends and family, as well as the entire health-care system and the economy.
Obesity-related treatments cost between $147 billion and $210 billion each year, which correlates to roughly 10% of all annual medical spending. Obesity was also shown to cost employers an average of $506 in productivity per obese employee each year, with medical claims costs running almost 10 times higher for obese employees relative to healthy-weight employees.
It isn’t just the figures that are scary from a businesses’ perspective, but the sheer fact that our health-care system may not have enough physicians capable of dealing with a dramatic rise in diseases caused by obesity as baby boomers grow older.
A greater effort is certainly needed to make a dent in the American psyche on obesity. In the meantime, though, expect weight-control management and obesity-related symptom maintenance drugmakers to flourish.
The article Alarming New Obesity Data Points to a Scary Trend originally appeared on Fool.com is written by Sean Williams.
Fool contributor Sean Williams has no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on CAPS under the screen name TMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle @TMFUltraLong.The Motley Fool owns shares of, and recommends, Johnson & Johnson.
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