The rise in popularity of weight loss medications such as Ozempic hasn’t gone unnoticed by consumers in Denmark, with new data from Statistics Denmark finding that the use of such medicines is on the increase.
In 2023, some 2.4% of the adult population of Denmark redeemed a prescription for a weight loss medicine – some 117,500 adults. Weight loss medicines are typically targeted at people with a BMI of at least 30.
This is a 1.8 percentage point increase on the previous year, when 0.6% of the population (27,800 adults) were prescribed a weight loss medication, and up from 0.3% in 2021 (15,200 adults).
At the same time, however, the total percentage of Danish consumers taking weight loss medication is lower than 25 years ago, when 131,100 adults (3.1%) used weight loss medicines.
Women higher users of weight loss medication
The proportion of users of weight loss medicines is higher for women across all age brackets – as of the first half of 2023, 72% of the users were women and 28% were men. The proportion of users was highest in the age group of 50-59-year-olds (3.2%) and lowest in the age group of 80-year-olds and older (0.1%).
In addition, there is a difference in the proportion of users of weight loss medicines across municipalities. The highest proportion of users was in Tårnby (2.9%), while the lowest proportion was in Læsø (0.8%).
The municipality of Gentofte, north of Copenhagen, had the highest proportion of users of weight loss medicines in the first half of 2023. In Gentofte, there were 24.5% users of weight loss medicines per 100 people living with obesity, while in Læsø, there were 2.9% users per 100 people living with obesity.
Statistics Denmark also sought to determine whether there was a correlation between the use of weight loss medicines and income, and found that in the first half of 2023, 1.6% of consumers in the lowest income bracket used weight loss medicines, while it was about 3.4% of the people in the highest income bracket.
