Study author Ziyad Al-Aly, a WashU Medicine epidemiologist, described the effect as a “metabolic whiplash.”
The good news: they found that the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients who consistently took GLP-1s over three years fell by 18 percent, backing up a wealth of research demonstrating its health benefits beyond simply losing weight.
And now for the bad: quitting GLP-s for as short a period as six months, the study found, spiked their risk of a major cardiovascular event by as much as 8 percent. And those who stopped taking them for one or two years saw their risk shoot up by 22 percent, wiping out the protection the drug offered.