Back

Decoding the hallmarks of GLP-1RA weight-loss super responders

Venkatakrishnan, A.; Murugadoss, K.; Soundararajan, V.

2025-11-17 endocrinology
10.1101/2025.11.15.25340314 medRxiv
Show abstract

Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) have reshaped obesity treatment, yet weight-loss outcomes remain highly uneven in real-world care. Using a federated biomedical platform integrating 23 million de-identified U.S. patient records, we analyzed 135,349 individuals treated with GLP-1RAs and stratified them as "super responders" (>15% weight loss), "moderate responders" (5-15% weight loss), "minimal weight-loss group" (<5% weight loss), and "weight regainers". super responders reversed nearly two decades of age-associated weight gain in one year, representing approximately a decade more weight reversal than moderate responders. Compared with Wegovy (semaglutide), Zepbound (tirzepatide) showed 47% higher odds (CI: 33-61%) of super-response and 30% lower odds (CI: 23-37%) of minimal weight-loss. Likewise, relative to Ozempic (semaglutide), Mounjaro (tirzepatide) showed 284% (CI: 265-304%) higher odds of super-response and 48% (CI: 46-51%) lower odds of minimal weight-loss. AI-enabled curation processed more than 14 million clinical notes and 15 million structured records covering 1,426 disease terms across the year before and after GLP-1RA initiation. Wegovy and Ozempic super responders showed marked post-treatment increases in vomiting compared with pre-treatment baselines, as reflected by pre-to-post rate ratios (RR 0.37, p=0.014 and RR 0.09, p<0.001). In contrast, Zepbound super responders showed significantly lower post-treatment vomiting relative to baseline (RR 2.34, p<0.001), indicating brand-specific gastrointestinal tolerability profiles. Ozempic (RR 0.24, p<0.001) and Mounjaro (RR 0.17, p<0.001) super responders each showed significant post-treatment increases in diagnoses of protein-energy malnutrition, suggesting a need for whole-body compositional imaging to distinguish beneficial fat loss from unintended lean-mass loss. Novel signals for therapeutic expansion also emerged. Compared with pre-treatment baselines, Zepbound showed significantly reduced post-treatment encounters for recurrent major depressive disorder (pre-to-post RR 12.6, p<0.001) and asthma (pre-to-post RR 2.6, p<0.001). Patient stratification prior to therapy initiation revealed pre-treatment signatures that can guide GLP-1RA choice, with Zepbound super responders showing lower sleep apnea prevalence (baseline RR 0.42, p<0.001) and higher muscle stiffness prevalence (baseline RR 2.4, p=0.037). This study pinpoints actionable physiological signatures and GLP-1RA brand-specific opportunities that emerge from heterogeneous real-world responses, outlining a map for guided precision obesity interventions.

Published in Biology Methods and Protocols (predicted rank #17) · training set

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.