Adherence to and Dropout from Liraglutide 3.0 mg Obesity Treatment in a Real-World Setting

The factors associated with non-adherence to obesity treatment using liraglutide 3.0 mg in a real-world setting remain elusive.

We performed a secondary data analysis of 769 participants treated with liraglutide 3.0 mg from December 2017 to June 2020 at nine Korean hospitals. Data were collected 2, 4, and 6 months after treatment initiation. Adherence groups were defined as <2, 2-4, 4-6, and ≥6 months.

Among the 769 patients, 539 (70.1%) were lost to follow-up within 6 months because of unknown reasons (54.2%), adverse events (14.8%), change of treatment (13.7%), or discontinuation due to poor weight loss (9.3%). Dropout at 6 months was significantly associated with the presence of diabetes mellitus in step 1 and the presence of diabetes mellitus with regular exercise in step 2 of the logistic regression analysis using the forward stepwise selection method. After adjusting for covariates, the presence of diabetes mellitus (odds ratio [OR], 0.25; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.10-0.63; OR, 0.47; 95% CI, 0.31-0.73; and OR, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.34-0.80) and regular exercise (OR, 2.86; 95% CI, 1.31-6.23; OR, 2.09; 95% CI, 1.26-3.48; and OR, 2.99; 95% CI, 1.81-4.92) showed significant associations in the <2, 2-4, and 4-6 groups compared with the highest adherence group (≥6 months).

Non-adherence to obesity treatment with liraglutide is related to regular exercise and absence of diabetes mellitus. Further prospective studies are warranted to increase medication adherence in those groups.