Nine in 10 U.S. Teens Who Qualified for Obesity Surgery Got Neither Surgery Nor a GLP-1 Drug by Late 2025, Northwestern Finds
Among more than 1.4 million U.S. adolescents in health records from 2017 to 2025 who met guideline criteria for metabolic and bariatric surgery, fewer than 1% had surgery and 4.6% received at least one GLP-1 prescription, Northwestern Medicine researchers reported in JAMA Pediatrics. GLP-1 prescribing rose about 35-fold, from 301 to 10,676 per 100,000 eligible teens, but by late 2025 90.4% had received neither treatment, and privately insured teens got GLP-1 prescriptions at 2.4 times the rate of uninsured or self-pay patients.