{"id":799727,"date":"2026-10-12T02:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T02:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/799727\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T02:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T02:18:10","slug":"hse-to-consider-access-to-weight-loss-drug-mounjaro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/799727\/","title":{"rendered":"HSE to consider access to weight loss drug Mounjaro"},"content":{"rendered":"

A decision by a HSE expert group to approve the drug Mounjaro could be “transformative”, according to consultant endocrinologist Professor Donal O’Shea.<\/p>\n

However, Prof O’Shea said more than a million people were likely to be eligible and this could cost the State upwards of \u20ac2 – \u20ac3 billion.<\/p>\n

The expert group will meet on Tuesday to consider whether members of the public who need the weight loss drug called Tirzepatide, which is more widely known as Mounjaro, should be able to receive it free or at a reduced cost, based on its clinical benefits.<\/p>\n

The drug company, Eli Lilly, has engaged with Irish authorities in recent months on a pricing offer.<\/p>\n

In June, Professor Michael Barry from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics described this price reduction as “significant” and said the drug could be considered cost effective or very close to it.<\/p>\n

The final decision will be made by HSE management after they hear the evidence from the expert group.<\/p>\n

A decision to make the drug more widely available is likely to cost the State billions, but Professor O’Shea said its benefits go beyond weight loss.<\/p>\n

“Its about benefits to blood pressure, the benefits to insulin resistance, you’re less likely to develop diabetes, you’re less likely to develop cancer,” he told the This Week Programme on RT\u00c9 Radio One.<\/p>\n

He said there could also be further benefits for those with Down Syndrome where obesity could be a major driver of dementia and for the adult intellectual disability population, as well as to those with alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder.<\/p>\n

“There are wide-ranging benefits and we need to be careful how we resource it and make sure we use it in the right way and not let social media hijack the narrative,” he warned.<\/p>\n

He said there were two ways in which the HSE could decide to allow greater access to the drug.<\/p>\n

The first would be giving it to people with a BMI over 30. However Professor O’Shea said that a BMI could be a poor individual assessment of your health. He said it would be better to offer it to people with a BMI of 27 or greater, combined with comorbities such as hyperyension, cardiovascular disease, pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n

Ideally he said it should be prescribed on a case by case basis.<\/p>\n

Despite the expected high cost, Professor O’Shea said this would be money “massively well spent”.<\/p>\n

“The problem is you’re spending money, billions potentially, to save money and you never see the saved money in the health service. You don’t see the hip that doesn’t get replaced, the diabetes that is not developed.”<\/p>\n

He said making it more widely available would also reduce health inequality in Ireland because at the moment the drug is only being taken by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n

He said a positive decision on Tuesday, along with Minister Jennifer Murnane O’Connor’s annoucement in Budget 2027 of \u20ac2.4 million along with additional posts for obesity services meant it was the best week he had seen in his career in terms of developments in managing obesity.<\/p>\n

He said there were more drugs in development and in the pipeline that had the potential to completely reverse metabolic disease, something he thought he would never hear.<\/p>\n

Among the challenges he said frailty and more falls could occur if people lost weight through these drugs.<\/p>\n

He said they were also likely to remain too expensive for lower income countries globally.<\/p>\n

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n

Shifting the focus away from weight loss<\/p>\n

Carel le Roux, Professor of metabolic medicine at UCD has previously done consultancy work with the manufacturer of Mounjaro, Eli Lilly. He carried out work to examine the drug’s effectiveness not only in treating obesity but in markedly lowering the progression of type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n

He says any decision about making the drug more widely available here is important and that it would deliver value for money to the tax payer.<\/p>\n

“Its critical because it shifts the focus away from weight loss to health gain, and its health gain that really atters to people.<\/p>\n

\"Professor
\nProfessor Carel le Roux of UCD<\/p>\n

“We can reduced the risk of developing diabetes by 90%. We can reduce blood pressure by 8 mil mercury. We can actually take people who have diabetes and turn the clock back and put them into glycemic remission. So really, this decision will help us change our focus to really drive the quality of life that people need.”<\/p>\n

He said the expert group was using information from international randomised controlled trials which had also shown a reductiuon in the risk of having a heart attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decision by a HSE expert group to approve the drug Mounjaro could be “transformative”, according to consultant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[102,6591,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-799727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}