Could a simple patch, inspired by the weight-loss drug Ozempic, really help you shed excess kilos without the pain and effort of an injection?

Promotions of these Ozempic-style, weight-loss patches are popping up online, promising dramatic results with little evidence to back their claims.

Personal recommendations for the patches are common. This includes from some “doctors” on social media. But independent fact checkers have shown these endorsements are AI-generated.

So, before you spend your money, here’s why you should think twice about buying a weight-loss patch.

What’s in them? Do they work?

Ozempic-style patches are also known as GLP-1 patches. But they do not contain any pharmaceutical ingredient from Ozempic (semaglutide) or related drugs such as Mounjaro (tirzepatide).

Instead, the Ozempic-style patches contain a mixture of herbal extracts including berberine, green tea (Camellia sinensis), the tropical fruit Garcinia cambogia and bitter orange (Citrus x aurantium L.).

There is some laboratory evidence that select compounds from berberine, the polyphenols in green tea extract and hydroxycitric acid from G. cambogia may have some effect. This includes suppressing appetite, lowering blood glucose (sugar) levels and playing a role in regulating fat metabolism to promote weight loss.

However, laboratory evidence doesn’t automatically translate to what happens in humans. In fact, recent evidence in humans shows these herbs have little effect on weight loss.

Let’s take berberine. Mostly, the evidence indicates that people who take it don’t lose a lot of weight. One scientific review showed that taking up to 3 grams daily for a year had only a small effect on weight and waist circumference.

Another review that analysed data from multiple studies found that up to 2.4g of green tea extract supplement daily for 13 weeks and more than 4g of G. cambogia daily for 17 weeks did not affect people’s weight.

For bitter orange extract, a daily dose of up to 54 milligrams of synephrine (a compound isolated from bitter orange extract) for eight weeks did not lead to weight loss.

It is important to note that all these studies are for oral formulations of herbal extracts, such as tablets or capsules, rather than for extracts delivered by patches.

Do they get through the skin?

Whether an extract in a weight-loss patch gets through the skin depends on how the extract was made.

Our skin is highly lipophilic, meaning it absorbs oily or fat-soluble chemicals, and blocks water-loving, or hydrophilic, substances.

So not all medicines can be delivered through the skin. Ozempic, for instance, is administered as an injection because the drug molecule in it is too big and water-loving to pass through the skin.

If the extracts in the patches are made using a water-based process, their ingredients are unlikely to pass through the skin and will simply sit inactive on your body until you remove the patch.

The next issue is that patches can only hold very little herbal extract. In the studies we discussed above, grams of material were needed to see any effect. In reality, Ozempic-style patches typically hold less than 0.1g of extract.

So, even if the ingredients get through the skin, these patches don’t contain enough to have any meaningful effect.

You can’t assume patches are safe

The Therapeutic Goods Administration regulates medical products in Australia, including herbal extracts.

For a herbal product to be permitted for sale in Australia it must be listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. There are no Ozempic-style patches on the register.

This means the quality and safety of any patch you buy has not been assessed and cannot be guaranteed.

An Australian study found instances where contamination with undeclared plant materials, heavy metals and prescription drugs, such as warfarin, have been reported in unregistered herbal products. These contaminants are dangerous because they can potentially be absorbed through the skin, then circulate around the body.

In a nutshell

While the idea of Ozempic-style weight-loss patches might seem appealing, they do not work, and their safety is far from guaranteed.

Instead of wasting your money, speak to your doctor or pharmacist who can recommend proven treatments for weight loss. They can provide safe and effective options tailored to help you reach your health goal.

Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University and Wai-Jo Jocelin Chan, Pharmacist and Lecturer, UNSW Sydney; University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many women worry hormonal contraceptives have dangerous side-effects including increased cancer risk. But this perception is often out of proportion with the actual risks.

So, what does the research actually say about cancer risk for contraceptive users?

And is your cancer risk different if, instead of the pill, you use long-acting reversible contraceptives? These include intrauterine devices or IUDs (such as Mirena), implants under the skin (such as Implanon), and injections (such as Depo Provera).

Our new study, conducted by the University of Queensland and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at this question.

We found long-acting contraceptives seem to be as safe as the pill when it comes to cancer risk (which is good news) but not necessarily any safer than the pill.

How does the contraceptive pill affect cancer risk?

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which compiles evidence on cancer causes, has concluded that oral contraceptives have mixed effects on cancer risk.

Using the oral contraceptive pill:

• slightly increases your risk of breast and cervical cancer in the short term, but
• substantially reduces your risk of cancers of the uterus and ovaries in the longer term.

Our earlier work showed the pill was responsible for preventing far more cancers overall than it contributed to.

In previous research we estimated that in 2010, oral contraceptive pill use prevented over 1,300 cases of endometrial and ovarian cancers in Australian women.

It also prevented almost 500 deaths from these cancers in 2013. This is a reduction of around 25% in the deaths that could have occurred that year if women hadn’t taken the pill.

In contrast, we calculated the pill may have contributed to around 15 deaths from breast cancer in 2013, which is less than 0.5% of all breast cancer deaths in that year.

What about long-acting reversible contraceptives and cancer risk?

Long-acting reversible contraceptives – which include intrauterine devices or IUDs, implants under the skin, and injections – release progesterone-like hormones.

These are very effective contraceptives that can last from a few months (injections) up to seven years (intrauterine devices).

Notably, they don’t contain the hormone oestrogen, which may be responsible for some of the side-effects of the pill (including perhaps contributing to a higher risk of breast cancer).

Use of these long-acting contraceptives has doubled over the past decade, while the use of the pill has declined. So it’s important to know whether this change could affect cancer risk for Australian women.

Our new study of more than 1 million Australian women investigated whether long-acting, reversible contraceptives affect risk of invasive cancers. We compared the results to the oral contraceptive pill.

We used de-identified health records for Australian women aged 55 and under in 2002.

Among this group, about 176,000 were diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2013 when the oldest women were aged 67. We compared hormonal contraceptive use among these women who got cancer to women without cancer.

We found that long-term users of all types of hormonal contraception had around a 70% lower risk of developing endometrial cancer in the years after use. In other words, the risk of developing endometrial cancer is substantially lower among women who took hormonal contraception compared to those who didn’t.

For ovarian cancer, we saw a 50% reduced risk (compared to those who took no hormonal contraception) for women who were long-term users of the hormone-containing IUD.

The risk reduction was not as marked for the implants or injections, however few long-term users of these products developed these cancers in our study.

As the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancers increases with age, it will be important to look at cancer risk in these women as they get older.

What about breast cancer risk?

Our findings suggest that the risk of breast cancer for current users of long-acting contraceptives is similar to users of the pill.

However, the contraceptive injection was only associated with an increase in breast cancer risk after five years of use and there was no longer a higher risk once women stopped using them.

Our results suggested that the risk of breast cancer also reduces after stopping use of the contraceptive implants.

We will need to follow-up the women for longer to determine whether this is also the case for the IUD.

It is worth emphasising that the breast cancer risk associated with all hormonal contraceptives is very small.

About 30 in every 100,000 women aged 20 to 39 years develop breast cancer each year, and any hormonal contraceptive use would only increase this to around 36 cases per 100,000.

What about other cancers?

Our study did not show any consistent relationships between contraceptive use and other cancers types. However, we only at looked at invasive cancers (meaning those that start at a primary site but have the potential to spread to other parts of the body).

A recent French study found that prolonged use of the contraceptive injection increased the risk of meningioma (a type of benign brain tumour).

However, meningiomas are rare, especially in young women. There are around two cases in every 100,000 in women aged 20–39, so the extra number of cases linked to contraceptive injection use was small.

The French study found the hormonal IUD did not increase meningioma risk (and they did not investigate contraceptive implants).

Benefits and side-effects

There are benefits and side-effects for all medicines, including contraceptives, but it is important to know most very serious side-effects are rare.

A conversation with your doctor about the balance of benefits and side-effects for you is always a good place to start.

Susan Jordan, Professor of Epidemiology, The University of Queensland; Karen Tuesley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland, and Penny Webb, Distinguished Scientist, Gynaecological Cancers Group, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.