Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

medicalxpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 394 posts

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#101

Post by bee_rider »

braza wrote: post #94

Maybe this one relates more with the Americans because Ozempic became a trend there: Why are most people jumping on this drug? At least for me, besides all the cliches and stereotypes about the USA people, there's huge access to nutrition, gyms, surgical procedures, capital for buying healthy food, and medicine in general.

Nutritious food is harder to prepare and/or doesn’t taste as good in some cases, surgeries and other drugs have side effects, gym is a pain to go to.

Also even though the US has high wages, everybody feels vaguely poor and stressed about money for some reason. There are a lot of little nickel-and-dime fees because we don’t have a good safety net, consumer protection, and we don’t have public healthcare.

(I’m not on Ozempic and I recently lost weight by just eating less, but I get why people want it, the alternatives are annoying).

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#102

Post by Gerardo1 »

tromp wrote: post #3

If this really has the potential to compete with Ozempic, then it should have a noticeable impact on Novo Nordisk's stock value [1], but we're not seeing that yet. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVO/

I really, really don't think that's a reasonable metric, especially on short timelines.

In a few years, when this has been trialed, approved, there are a few manufacturers? Maybe.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#103

Post by coffeecantcode »

lores wrote: post #92
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the mechanism. A caloric deficit causes your system to metabolize whatever it can. It likes fat because that's energy dense, but muscle is also a good source of energy as well, and the more rapid the weight loss, the more body mass it has to burn.

As far as I know, muscle is only used when fat reserves are depleted or you don't eat enough protein for the brain's personal amino acid supply. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about this, though, maybe an expert can weigh in.

Not an expert, but from my own research muscle will always atrophy to its functionally base necessary mass, there are of course genetics involved in muscle mass retention as well that can’t be overlooked. But you can be in a caloric deficit and your body is burning fat(which often times this leads to lower energy and less intense resistance training) while still losing muscle mass. I don’t believe they’re mutually exclusive.

You’re 100% right though, the key to retaining muscle mass while in a caloric deficit is consuming sufficient protein, or even over-consuming protein. In starvation situations muscle is next up after fat when getting consumed for energy but it seems like for the most part the muscle mass deterioration during significant weight loss periods is a natural side effect of the process and lifestyle required to accomplish it.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#104

Post by crazygringo »

thom wrote: post #7

Delighted to discover this kind of breakthrough is based on a gnarly regular expression: https://github.com/Svensson-Lab/pro-hormone-predictor/blob/m...

Please, if you write regexes like these, comment them...

A great way to do it is to split them up by concatenating them across a bunch of lines, and put a brief explanation at the end of each non-obvious part (to the right, on the same line).

Plus that also lets you indent within nested parentheses, making it that much more understandable.

I'm baffled when I come across a file like this where the code itself is heavily commented, but a gnarly regex is not. Regexes are not strings, they are code -- and with their syntax, they need comments even more.

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#105

Post by trehalose »

dleeftink wrote: post #75
sgc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regex is one of my favorite things to work with. It's surgery. I love having a very specific problem and a very sharp knife. What I hate is chasing down language or library bugs, or undocumented limitations. Of course I would hate it if I had never used it extensively. Its terseness is harder if you only have to pick it up occasionally.

You'll love this one then! [0]: https://cardoni.net/parsing-proper-nouns-with-regex/

That regex detects things like "eeieiieeeiA __ 1 2 3__" as a proper noun. I'm confused by the decision to accept any number of leading [ei] and any number of trailing (?:\s+[_\d]+).

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#106

Post by derektank »

jleyank wrote: post #36

Remember, weight loss is a side effect of the Ozempic family of drugs. It was intended as a type 2 diabetes drug and it’s quite successful in that area. Once alternate applications are revealed, drug design gets involved to develop alternatives. Medchemists and marketeers are clever…

That's not quite right. The clinical indication for Wegovy (and Zepbound for that matter) is, "As an adjunct to a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity for chronic weight management in adult patients with an initial BMI of 30 kg/m2 or greater (obesity)". Obesity itself is the disease the drug is approved to treat.

Now, Wegovy has the same active ingredient as Ozempic (Semaglutide), ditto for Zepbound and Mounjaro (Tirzepatide), and the latter have been prescribed off label for weight loss in the past but it's not just a marketing gimmick. These are different drugs in the eyes of the FDA because they are prescribed for different things (obesity vs. type 2 diabetes).

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#107

Post by dleeftink »

janfoeh wrote: post #89
dleeftink wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper litmus test, what's causing the hang in your case? Regex to me, is pattern finding and abstraction taken to the extreme. I like the challenge

Good question. The regex I tried is for extracting amounts in EUR and USD: / (? (? €|EUR|\$|USD ) [ \t]? )? (? (? -? \d{1,3} (?:[\.,]\d{3}|\d*) ) [\.,] (? \d{2,3} ) ) (? [ \t]? (? (? €|EUR|\$|USD ) ) | (? [ \t]|$|\n ) )/x

I'd imagine many nested named capturing groups may trip even the best automated system! I do like the solution though.

I would've probably approached it differently, trying to first get the 'inverted' match (i.e. ignore anything that isn't a currency-like pattern) and refine from there. A bit like this one I did a while back, to parse garbled strings that may occur after OCR [0]. I imagine the approach does not translate fully, because it's pattern extraction rather than validation.

[0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/never-go-nuts

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#108

Post by dleeftink »

trehalose wrote: post #105
dleeftink wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll love this one then! [0]: https://cardoni.net/parsing-proper-nouns-with-regex/

That regex detects things like "eeieiieeeiA __ 1 2 3__" as a proper noun. I'm confused by the decision to accept any number of leading [ei] and any number of trailing (?:\s+[_\d]+).

It's not perfect for sure, but perfectly suitable for a first pass and then a dictionary sweep or another set of regexes. I guess I like the compactness of it!

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#109

Post by [deleted] »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #48
xrisk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what this brings to the conversation. Are you able to attest to the correctness of what Sonnet claims?

I think we can be chill about it. For someone on the sidelines, mildly interested in the topic, an AI summary of the regex might be useful — and the person getting downvotes is saving some of us the time.

[deleted]

Re: Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects

#110

Post by sgc »

dleeftink wrote: post #75
sgc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regex is one of my favorite things to work with. It's surgery. I love having a very specific problem and a very sharp knife. What I hate is chasing down language or library bugs, or undocumented limitations. Of course I would hate it if I had never used it extensively. Its terseness is harder if you only have to pick it up occasionally.

You'll love this one then! [0]: https://cardoni.net/parsing-proper-nouns-with-regex/

I have done something similar before, to help form an index for a large book. This is what I would consider a relatively simple regex.

The harder ones I have dealt with are those looking for malformed syntax where the closing mark that might be missing could be several thousand characters after the opening mark, or the opening mark itself might be missing, across a data set that is several hundred million characters. So you need something very complex to find all the distinctive characteristics of the content that is supposed to be enclosed - while avoiding the many similar structures that give false positives. Sometimes the technically easier solution is too slow to run (look ahead and look behind, etc), so you need to pivot and use other regex features. It can take a day or two to get right.

Post reply on HN