Heart benefits fade after stopping GLP-1 medications | CNN

One major benefit of taking injected GLP-1 medications is a sizeable reduction in risk for heart attacks, strokes and other heart problems. However, if people stop taking the medication, those heart benefits are erased. A large new study has found that heart risks begin to return as soon as six months after stopping the drug and may be almost completely eclipsed as soon as a year and a half after stopping. The study authors said they believe coming off the drug creates a kind of “metabolic whiplash.” After stopping, the heart benefits seemed to be reversed more quickly than it took to get them in the first place, said study author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, who is a clinical epidemiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “It takes a whole lot longer to build or accrue benefit, and then half as much to erase all that benefit,” said Al-Aly, who is also chief of the Research and Development Service at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System. “For example, what took three years to build — three years of the cardiovascular benefit — was actually erased or undone with just one and a half years of stopping. So generally speaking, it takes twice as much to

Mar 18, 2026 → Mar 18, 2026