Pharmacological weight loss with incretin-based therapies does not result in a disproportionate loss of muscle mass or function in obese mice and humans
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: The new generation of incretin-based therapies are potent anti-obesity medications (AOMs) that offer the first non-surgical treatment for 936 million patients globally suffering from being overweight or obese (Federation, 2025). However, clinical data suggest that incretin-mimetics could cause a disproportionate decrease in lean body mass (LBM) (Jastreboff et al., 2022; Wilding et al., 2021), raising a concern for deterioration of skeletal muscle and acceleration of sarcopenic obesity (Prado et al., 2024). Unfortunately, muscle mass and function are not routinely assessed in obesity studies and original data on the matter remains sparse. In this work, we conducted various pre-clinical studies and a proof-of-concept clinical trial to examine how skeletal muscle is affected by AOMs. The overarching goal of our studies were to test if AOMs affect muscle mass disproportionately or whether changes are a simple function of weight loss. We found that in mice with diet-induced obesity (DIO), incretin-based therapies result predominantly in a substantial decrease in fat mass alongside a small but significant decrease in LBM. Among the lean tissues, the decrease in liver mass exceeded the change in muscle mass robustly. While absolute muscle mass did decrease, relative muscle mass (i.e., the muscle mass to body weight (BW) ratio) improved significantly. Similarly, we found that absolute muscle strength decreased mildly but increased relative to the BW of mice.
INSTRUMENT(S):
ORGANISM(S): Mus Musculus (mouse)
TISSUE(S): Gastrocnemius
SUBMITTER:
Andreas Hentschel
LAB HEAD: Prof. Dr. Albert Sickmann
PROVIDER: PXD070915 | Pride | 2026-01-22
REPOSITORIES: Pride
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