They’ve figured out the reason why obesity drugs make you feel sick

Gema Maldonado
They have revolutionized obesity treatment and even made headlines in the business press, but patients taking GLP1 agonist drugs, which help them shed significant amounts of weight, also experience side effects such as nausea, which, depending on the case, may lead to the need to stop treatment.

Now a group of researchers from Monell Chemical Senses Center from Pennsylvania (USA) have discovered a group of neurons in the brain that control food intake without causing nausea, and have described two different neural circuits that XXXXXX influence different effects of the same drug. These findings could be used to develop drugs with fewer side effects.

The work was published in a scientific journal Nature and provides a foundation to separate the therapeutic benefits from the side effects of GLP1 agonists by addressing the physiological relationship between post-meal satisfaction and the neurological control of nausea. “We examined the brain circuits that link satiation and disgust and unexpectedly found that the neural circuits that mediate these effects are functionally separate,” the authors write in their article.