In the weeks around the 2026 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, my phone kept buzzing with alerts about GLP-1 drugs and cancer. The headlines were everywhere – from NPR and The Washington Post to Substack and heated exchanges on social media – all circling the same claim: Ozempic might lower the risk of cancer. Behind those headlines is a real wave of studies, involving millions of patients. I’m a physician and clinical epidemiologist, and my team and I design and interpret these same kinds of studies that test what widely used drugs actually do. The excitement around the idea that GLP-1 drugs can prevent cancer is running well ahead of the evidence. Not wrong, necessarily. Just not yet earned. Cancer is among the hardest things to study, because it is not one disease but more than a hundred. Breast cancer, lung cancer and blood cancers are not variations of the same disease; each has its own distinct biology and its own mix of genetic, environmental and behavioral risks. A single drug never gets one verdict on how it affects cancer. It gets a hundred, raising the risk of some, lowering it for others and leaving most…
Healthcare
Can Ozempic prevent cancer? A doctor explains why the headlines are easy to misread
Source: The Conversation Health — CC BY-ND 4.0