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More than one million prescriptions are being written for obesity drugs in the UK alone, costing £47.5m a year and accounting for nearly 3% of total NHS expenditure. If untreated, obesity and related illnesses can cost many times this amount, so there is understandably a large market for drugs to treat the condition.

In the last decade the obesity epidemic has increased rapidly both in terms of proportion of the affected population of affected countries, but also in the number of countries where there is a cause for concern. Rather than being confined to a handful of developed nations, the disorder now affects many countries worldwide.