The consumption of medications included in the group known as “drugs used in diabetes” has risen by 21.9% between 2022 and 2025. This is reflected in the data on medicines prescribed by physicians within the National Health System and dispensed in publicly funded pharmacies, to which THE OBJECTIVE has gained access.
In 2022 a total of 53.87 million packages of medicines in the A10 group, which covers diabetes-related drugs, were supplied. The figure increased year by year with 57.31 million in 2023, 61.82 million in 2024, and 65.69 million in 2025.
Within this group are the GLP-1 receptor agonist medications, which imitate the action of an intestinal hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels and appetite, and are included in the subcategory A10BJ. Their consumption rose from 3.22 million packages in 2022 to 5.05 million in 2025, representing a 57.1% increase.
The trend is even more pronounced for semaglutide, identified in the data with the code A10BJ06 and used mainly to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. Records go from approximately 1.58 million packages in 2022 to 3.80 million in 2025, a rise of 140.5%. Dulaglutide — which belongs to the same group as semaglutide —, corresponding to the code A10BJ05, reached 1.13 million packages in 2025.
This newspaper has also requested information on Ozempic and Rybelsus, both of which contain semaglutide, and Trulicity, which contains dulaglutide, although the Ministry of Health explains that it cannot provide certain data broken down by individual drug and offers information aggregated by active ingredient and ATC5 classification, the most specific level of an international system used to classify medicines by composition and use.
The WHO does not recommend GLP-1-based drugs for children under 10
The World Health Organization (WHO) published last Wednesday the first international guidelines on pediatric obesity, stating that it does not recommend pharmacological treatment based on GLP-1 receptor agonists, bariatric surgery, or devices for weight loss in children up to 10 years of age.
“This is a strong recommendation,” said the director of the Nutrition and Food Safety Department of the organization, Dr. Luz María de Regil, who added that, conversely, measures “appropriate to the needs and circumstances of children and adolescents” are advisable. “For children from zero to nine years old, care should focus on structural interventions,” she explained.
Sleeping more could increase the risk of kidney disease
People with type 2 diabetes who sleep longer might have a higher risk of developing or worsening diabetic nephropathy, according to a study from Juntendo University in Tokyo, Japan, published in Journal of the Endocrine Society.
Diabetic nephropathy, also known as diabetic kidney disease, is a serious kidney condition caused by long-term damage from type 1 or type 2 diabetes. It is one of the most common and serious complications of diabetes, affecting approximately 30% to 40% of people with this condition. It is strongly associated with progression to end-stage renal disease and an increased risk of cardiovascular events.
“Diabetic kidney disease is an important complication of diabetes and can lead to kidney failure and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Sleep is a simple and everyday aspect of life, so our findings suggest that a longer duration of sleep could be a useful clue for identifying people with diabetes who may require more careful attention to their kidney health,” stated the study’s author, Dr. Tomoya Mita, from the Faculty of Medicine of Juntendo University in Tokyo.
“At the same time, people should not interpret our findings as a recommendation to reduce their sleep, since this was an observational study and we cannot establish a causal relationship between sleep duration and kidney disease,” he explained.
The researchers studied 678 Japanese individuals with type 2 diabetes and found that longer habitual sleep duration was associated with a greater risk of developing or worsening diabetic nephropathy during roughly six years of follow-up. The association was particularly evident among older adults and those who already showed signs of kidney damage, such as microalbuminuria or reduced kidney function.
