GLP-1s and Cancer Risk: Reviewing the New 86,000 Patient Study
A new study just dropped in October 2025 looking at over 86,000 GLP-1 users across 10 years. The cancer reduction numbers are honestly mind-blowing. I don't usually build a whole video around one study, but this one is too important to skip.
What the study actually looked at
Published in JAMA Oncology, the researchers analyzed 86,632 patients on GLP-1s for up to 10 years. They used one-to-one propensity matching and tracked 14 different cancer types.
Here's who was in the study. Adults with BMI over 27 with a comorbidity, or over 30. Average age 52. 68% female. 50% had type 2 diabetes. No prior cancer history.
So they took people without cancer, followed them, and watched who developed it.
The headline numbers
GLP-1 users showed a 17% lower overall cancer risk versus non-users. That's 13.6 cases per 1,000 versus 16.4 per 1,000.
Then it gets really interesting when you break it down by cancer type.
- Ovarian cancer: 47% reduction
- Meningioma (brain tumors): 31% reduction
- Endometrial (uterine) cancer: 25% reduction
- Breast cancer: 14% reduction
- Colorectal cancer: 12% reduction
A 47% reduction in ovarian cancer risk. Almost half. Think about that for a second.
And remember, these numbers come from older GLP-1s like liraglutide, exenatide, and semaglutide. The data doesn't even fully account for tirzepatide and retatrutide yet, which are way more effective.
Why obesity drives cancer in the first place
Obesity is linked to at least 13 cancer types and accounts for 40% of all US cancer diagnoses. It's the second leading cause of cancer behind tobacco, and some experts think it'll pass tobacco soon.
Here's how obesity feeds cancer.
Bad estrogens. Excess fat tissue produces forms of estrogen that fuel hormone-sensitive cancers like endometrial and breast. Estradiol itself is healthy. The problem is the other estrogen metabolites that show up in metabolically deranged people.
Insulin resistance. Elevated insulin and IGF-1 stimulate cell proliferation and inhibit cell death. Chronically high fasting insulin is basically a ticking time bomb for tumor growth.
Chronic inflammation. Fat tissue releases pro-inflammatory cytokines that damage DNA and suppress the immune system's ability to find and kill cancer cells.
For context, bariatric surgery patients losing more than 20% of body weight saw a 50% reduction in cancer over time in an 18 million patient analysis. Weight loss reduces cancer risk. We've known this. GLP-1s are just doing it without the surgery.
How GLP-1s are likely doing this
A few mechanisms are probably at play.
Weight loss itself shrinks fat tissue, lowers those bad estrogens, drops leptin, and reduces inflammation.
Better metabolism means lower insulin and glucose, which removes a major growth signal for cancer cells.
Lower inflammation across the board. CRP, IL-6, and TNF-alpha all drop, making the body a less friendly environment for tumors to develop.
There may also be direct effects. Some tumors have GLP-1 receptors, and the medication may interact with them directly. That's where a lot of oncology research could be heading.
The one concerning finding
Not all rainbows. The study found a 38% higher kidney cancer risk in GLP-1 users.
This could be a chance finding, detection bias, or a real effect. But here's the thing. 50% of the people in this study were type 2 diabetic, and basically all of them were obese. Diabetics and obese people already have kidney issues at much higher rates.
So is the kidney cancer signal from the GLP-1, or from the underlying metabolic disease these people already had? I don't know. But I'm not stopping GLP-1s over it, and I think it's worth keeping an eye on as more data comes out.
The limits of this study
This is observational data, not causal. Retrospective analysis. Correlation, not causation.
It's also unclear if the benefits come from the weight loss itself or from unique GLP-1 properties. Honestly, who cares? If it works, it works.
The median follow-up was three to four years. Cancer often takes longer to develop, so we're probably missing some long-term effects, both good and bad.
My take
This is one of the more important studies I've seen on GLP-1s. A 17% drop in overall cancer risk and a 47% drop in ovarian cancer is not small potatoes. These are population-changing numbers.
And remember, this data is based on the older GLP-1s. Imagine what tirzepatide, retatrutide, and whatever comes next will show in 10 years.
The real lesson here is upstream prevention. Heal metabolic disease before it has a chance to become heart disease or cancer. That's what GLP-1s, peptide therapy, and hormone therapy let us actually do.
Stay lean. Use GLP-1s at whatever dose you need, micro or macro. Don't mega-dose and don't titrate up too fast just to chase insurance reimbursements. That's where people get into trouble.
Cancer is just the tip of the iceberg for what these drugs are going to show us.
Full transcript click any paragraph to jump video
Hey, everybody. This is Hunter Williams. I hope you're doing amazing wherever you might be in the world. Today's video is going to be about the link between GLP one use and cancer. So probably this is not going be on YouTube because my YouTube channel was deleted so I can talk about really anything I want and hopefully it stays up on platforms. But at the very least, all I'm gonna be doing is reviewing some data today. We had this new study come out that basically analyzed, I think like we'll talk about in the slides, like 86,000 patients that have used GLPs over the
last 10 years. And there was some startling evidence that they found in terms of correlation between GLP one use and cancer risk. This was just published, I think in October of 2025. So it's very recent that this just came out. My theory is that we will continue and continue to see more and more data about all chronic diseases being reduced through GLP-1 use. And this cancer is just one of many things that they're starting to find now.
There's less alcohol use. There's all these ancillary benefits secondary to the weight loss that comes from GOP1s. And the one I'm going to be talking about today just has cancer. So really what I want to do, it's going be pretty simple video. I just going walk through the study and summarize what they found. Typically wouldn't do this just with one video of like taking a study in doing the video, but I think it so powerful and so profound. When you look at the data statistically, and these are studies like when we're looking at this, we are yes, looking correlation, not causation, but some of the numbers that you're going to see are so mind blowing today.
You really have to like sit and think, cause when you hear a percentage, you know, like 17 or 30 or 25%, you think okay, I like 70%, but that's like, when everything else is controlled for. So we were controlling for all other variables. We're getting that big of a reduction, which is pretty insane when they think about it. frame this is so massive in scope. And when we're looking at this 10 years back, what GLPs did we have 10 year ago? We had Lyra glutide, we had exenitide. We have semaglutide and so these are going to be the ones that are showing the results.
Imagine what's going happen in 10 more years when you have trisapatite and trutite because they're so much even better than some of those early stage GLP's. So I also want to frame that like, Think how good this is now. Imagine 10 years where this goes with GLPs. And although pharmaceutical companies will continue to print money off of them, imagine the cost savings around healthcare when we look at some of the statistics we're going to see today around cancer. So again, I typically wouldn't do like a one video for one study, but this was so profound in scope that I was like, man,
gotta talk about this because it's crazy how much GLP-1s are reducing cancer. And then when we look at it, it makes sense because cancer in a lot of cases is metabolic disease. So we're going to talk about the day, but I'm really excited for this because it's confirmation of what many people like myself that work in this world already see on a practical basis. But I love zooming out and looking at this like law of large numbers of, what's really going on now that we have statistically significant data and numbers
around this. I'm excited for this one. As always, make sure you're on the email list so that you can stay in touch with me to get updates on new videos that come out. And then also when I send out informational emails, a lot of times what I do is I'll be working on concepts of videos and I'd be like, man, I got to write an email about this and send it to my email lists. So it's fun. It's informative. Yes, there's ad placements inside the emails. But it not selling anything. it is just informative and helpful stuff. Along this journey, we call life. And so for me, that's the best way to stay in touch with me if you want to continue to follow my content, because, hey, right now I'm making a video about
GLP-1s and cancer. That's not always friendly to the algorithm, so to speak. I think this should be okay. Spotify seems to not really care what I say, which is cool because there's a decent number of people that use Spotify on their phones, but you can also check it out on iTunes and all that good stuff. So without further ado, I must share my screen. Every day we're going to look at a study on GLPs and Cancer risk. All right, let's jump into it. GLP-1 receptor agonist and cancer prevention in obesity. Some of the data we're gonna go over today, at least if, I guess from my side, sometimes people look at stats and it's like you can manipulate stats to
say whatever you wanna say, but I have a background, so I'm a bachelor's of science degree in finance and accounting, and much of that degree was based in quantitative analysis and understanding statistics and probabilities. And so, i'm not a medical researcher by any means, When I see some of these statistics, I have a good grounding in like statistical methodology and how that works. And when I saw some these, it's mind blowing. So I want to do my best to convey that to you, especially if you're not a math person today, of what this kind of implies for us going forward.
Now let's look at cancer and obesity connected together. Obesity is linked to at least 13 different cancer types accounting for 40% of US cancer diagnoses. What that means, out of 100 people that get cancer, 40 of them have a cancer that is directly related to metabolic disease and I think that number is probably actually higher, but again, we're being conservative and we are looking at things like smoking and environmental exposure. It's the second leading cause of cancer diagnoses behind tobacco.
An expert's born obesity may surpass smoking as the leading preventable cause GLP-1s, which are obviously our semaglutide, liragglutid, exenotide triseptide retitrutide and all the ones that will come in the future, may help lower, according to the study, cancer risk in people with obesity. And that's what we're going to look at today. Now let's look, I just want to put the numbers up first and we'll go into what this looked at. Let's go through this. There was the study was published in August of 2025. It analyzed 86,632 patients over up to 10 years and was Journal of American Medicine oncology.
And what they found is this 17% lower overall cancer risk. So GOP1 users showed 17%, reduced cancer incidents versus non-users, which was 13.6 per every thousand versus 16.4. For every 1000 people, there was a 17 percent lower risk of cancer in general. And then we get into specific types of cancers. There was 25% decrease in endometrial cancer and women.
which is uterine cancer risk. There was a 47% ovarian cancer reduction, nearly half the risk, which was the largest one, the larger relative reduction observed in the study. Now, percentage-wise, again, I want you to think of that. 47 percent reduction in risk of cancer. for ovarian cancer. Think about that and think about like when we talk about ovariant cancer, how closely linked that is with metabolic disease and obesity. And then we have 31% reduction in meningioma, struggle to pronounce that word, meningoma which was brain tumors and GLP-1 receptor agonists.
So think of that. How could a GLp- 1 have a 31 percent reduction and brain tumor? Think of how powerful that it is. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. But again, this is not small potatoes. We look at context, obviously, This is emerging evidence and we're not like studying, we are not putting GLP-1s in a petri dish with a cancer cell and seeing what happens, right? I mean, someone's probably doing that somewhere, but we looking at contexts and looking correlation. we obviously need more research around these.
Were still in the early stages and were now using GLp- 1s that are even better than some of this data is based on, which I think is important to understand. And then when we look at this, why is it happening? GOP1s promote weight loss, improve insulin levels, and reduce inflammation, which are all factors influencing cancer risk. So we've got to understand the context again. This is correlation, not causation. Now, let's look a the obesity and cancer connection. There's 13 cancer types that we know of, probably more if you like really critically think around it. Let's just say 13 types connected to obesity.
We have endometrial cancer, breast cancer ovarian cancer colorectal cancer liver cancer kidney cancer pancreas cancer esophageal adenocarcinoma esophygous cancer thyroid cancer and then meningioma and multiple myeloma. Now we look at that 40% of all cancer diagnoses come from these cancers that are related to obesity. And when we look at it, the only thing more than that is tobacco.
So what is the second leading cause of cancer? Obesity. What is leading causes of death? Heart disease, second-leading cause cancer, 40% of that linked to obesity. You see how obesity and being inflamed is causing this. And again, I just want you to understand that, that nearly half of all cancers come from the fact that people are too fat. When we think about heart disease versus cancer You think, okay, like heart disease, obviously someone was fat, they didn't take care of themselves metabolically.
Well, cancer, that could be anything, right? It could genetic, it could environmental. What we're seeing is that almost half, 40%, are from obesity. And so if you're not getting heart diseases from being obese, there's a likelihood that you can get a cancer that results from metabolic dysfunction. How does obesity drive cancer? Excess fat can produce bad estrogens, not estradiol, which is healthy for us, but these different bad estrogen that I'm not going to get to, yes, in some cases can fuel hormone sensitive cancers like endometrial and breast cancer. And a lot of times estridiol is not bad.
It's all these other things that when we look at metabolically deranged people, they have different levels of estrones and these things out there. So it's not that estrogen itself is bad, estrdiol it is actually good for and actually would help Prevent cancer in a lot of cases with healthy levels. It's these other different parts of estrogen that can be bad that come from us being too fat. We also have insulin resistance. So elevated insulin and super high IGF-1 levels, not optimized, but if they're too high, they can stimulate cell proliferation and inhibit cell death,
which obviously create conditions for tumor growth. elevated insulin levels, elevated fascinating insulin, levels is a ticking time bomb to a tumor and it's not going to happen in everyone, but it definitely is. A recipe for disaster. And then ultimately we look at chronic inflammation, fat tissue releases pro inflammatory cytokines, which cause DNA damage and suppress immune surveillance against cancer cells. which then let the cancer cells run riot. So there's a multitude of other reasons, but those are going to be some of the biggest ones of why obesity causes cancer.
And then when we look at weight loss, guess what? It reduces cancer risk. Patients that have bariatric surgery, patients losing greater than 20% of their body weight through bariatic surgery saw a 50% reduction in cancer incidence over time. Weight loss surgery is linked to markedly lower rates of colorectal, liver, kidney, and other major cancers through an 18 million patient analysis. And with one in three American adults having obesity, it's probably more than that now. Interventions that achieve weight loss could prevent substantial cancer burden, not amongst, I mean, amongst individuals,
but then obviously at a population wide level too. And enter GOP1s. So bariatric surgery, 20, 25 years ago used to be much more popular than it is now because we didn't have some of these amazing tools, but let's look at GOPs. GOPS simply put, they mimic the GOp1 hormone to enhance insulin secretion, suppress glucagon, slow gastric emptying and reduce our appetite. Remarkable weight loss, obviously semen glutide induces around 15% body weight reduction. And I think 48 weeks or whatever it is, turzapetide even more.
I Think it's like 22% red at your time, 24% over a year time horizon, give or take. And then we have, because of that weight loss, we Have lower blood pressure. We have improved cholesterol and we reduced cardiovascular events in high risk patients. Then obviously we some of these older ones that we're using the study, Lyric Glutide, Semiglutides and Turzapatide. And so that's what they're doing. I don't know specifically. It was much more based on just the early stage single agonist GLP ones, but you could imagine how much of a benefit the double and triple agones are going
to have. Now let's look at what's happening. So we have actually record quarter in Q3 2025. I believe Eli Lilly between Zephan and Manjaro just for Zappadad alone had $10 billion in sales. We have over 100 million US adults meeting the criteria for GLP-1 therapy. Obviously now it's FDA approved beyond diabetes for weight loss, cardiovascular risk reduction and metabolic liver disease treatment. And for the most part, if you do them right, they're very safe and very effective.
Where they go wrong is mega dosing and titrating up too fast to get more re insurance reimbursements. That's where people go. Wrong. If managed properly, there are some of the best drugs, If not the drug that mankind has ever seen. Fortunately, through the malpractice of some people that are providing them, we're seeing really good effects. Now, when we look at specifically for cancer risk, what would a GLP-1 be doing that's gonna stop cancer? Obviously we have weight loss. We have 10 to 15% body weight reduction in almost everyone that shrinks fat tissue, lowers these bad estrogens because it's decreasing fat tissues,
not estradiol, but some of the bad estrogen that feed or are there because of fat issue. lowering leptin, and then also lowering inflammation. We have improved metabolism, which means that we have lower insulin and glucose levels, reducing the growth signal to cancer cells. Perhaps the most important thing, we've reduced inflammation, so decreased CRP, interleukin-6, TNF-alpha creates less permissive environment for tumors. And then we also have direct effects. So, geopolitical receptors in some tumors may respond to medication directly.
That's what I was saying. I don't know that anyone is working on this. Maybe I'll research it after this video. We actually may be seeing a direct effect on tumors themselves through GOP1s, which think how cool would that be? So you get a tumor and now we have a GOp1 that can directly interact with the receptors on that tumor to kill the tumor. Pretty cool. And that's probably where a lot of this research is heading in the oncology world. Just to review the study, again, there was 86,000 patients. They did a one-to-one propensity matching. Up to 10 years of follow-up, 14 cancer types were tracked.
The adults all had BMIs over 27 with a comorbidity or over 30. Their average age was 52 years old, 68% were female, 50% of the people in the studies had type 2 diabetes, and there were no prior cancer history in the patients they analyzed, meaning that the people that they analyze, they didn't have cancer. They had no cancer, and then they tracked over that time to see who acquired cancer and this is what they saw through the numbers.
Just to sum up again, the ovarian cancer, 47% risk reduction. Brain tumors, 31% reduction, endometrial, 25% percent risk, reduction overall cancer 17% red risk. Reduction. There's actually a 14% risks, percent risks reduction in cold or shooting breast cancer. And then a 12%. Risk reduction and colorectal cancer or even for some of those ones that would not necessarily be lumped in. as a metabolically associated cancer as some of the other ones would, still a massive risk reduction in those, which I think is very important to understand.
And I, think these numbers will continue to rise as we see longer use of GLP-1s and then more prevalent use GLPs. Again, this is observational, not causal. So we're looking at retrospective analysis of this against correlation. We can't definitively say, but what's really cool is that it's there. Also too, we have to look at the weight loss versus the drug effects. So it's unclear if benefits stem from weight-loss itself or unique GLP-1 properties. I think it it kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Who cares if it doing it?
And then also too there was a short follow-up period. There's three or four-year median may miss some of the long-term effects on cancer development because obviously they take years. Now I did want to include this. Maybe it is not all unicorns and rainbows. there a 38% higher kidney cancer risk increase that should be monitored. this may be a chance finding, it may detection bias or a real effect. And I think this is one of the things that people, they don't really talk about kidney issues. They talk more about thyroid issues because that was something that revealed in rodent findings, which we haven't seen at all in human data that I've seen.
When we look at the kidney cancer, what did we know? The people in this study were obese and they were In 50% of the cases type 2 diabetic, well, what do we know about people that are obese and type two diabetic? They have kidney issues. It's very common. And so does this mean that it's 38% increase in kidney cancer risk from the GLPs or is it because these people are not metabolically healthy and we see that increase? So I don't know, but I didn't want to put that in there because obviously I want The last thing I would worry about using a GLP is getting kidney cancer,
but it is something to be conscious of when we look at this is this was the only one that they noticed an uptick because every other form of cancer was a downtick. So do GLPs ones cause kidney? Not in my opinion, But in the data we do see this and I think it's one of those things. How many of these people are diabetic? 50%. How may of them were obese? pretty much 100% because they were prescribed these drugs and they looked at in the study. And so we're not looking at metabolically healthy people.
I don't want that to come off as like a raining on the parade of this to look at these findings. But at the same time, it's something to be conscious of. Now, does that mean that I'm going to discontinue GOP1s? Absolutely not. Because again, this is correlation versus causation. What do we look at? I think with 137 million eligible U S adults, even moderate modest per person risk reduction could prevent thousands, if not millions of cancer cases in
the future. As of today, GLP ones are not approved for cancer intervention or prevention, but physicians can discuss this. And again, when we looked at research, we should demand that research get pushed in this direction. I don't think it will be, chronic disease, heart disease cancer, the future is going to be centered around a lot of these GLPs and you're gonna have pharmaceutical companies that can continue to make a lotta money so they're probably gonna wanna use that. But I think against all the things that we have, cancer's a big business and if you come up with things to cure cancer you might be putting yourself on
the chopping block to a target of some of the powers that be in the world. But what's cool is if you do jujitsu and use your enemy's energy against them and you prevent metabolic disease before it has a chance to take hold, look at what we're doing to cancer. And so even though there are likely things in the world that exist right now to stop cancer, Will those things become mainstream? No, because cancer's a big business. But what else is a business?
Healing obesity. If we heal obesity upstream, it's going to stop a lot of downstream. Not to say it is going cure cancer, but it definitely stops a of it, which could alleviate some of the burden economically and society-wide on our population. So we have a paradigm shift in prevention. Again, the best thing we can do is maintain a healthy weight, stay lean, use GLPs and a micro dose or macro dose, whatever you need to be lean and stay informed as the research continues to come out. I'm excited.
to maintain health for the long term and improve longevity and in doing so, hopefully mitigate some of these pathways that end up leading to or even exacerbating cancer. And that's why GLPs I think are the future or represent the cornerstone and future of medicine 3.0. And that is it for the slides. And, that, is my reaction video. I finally did a reaction to a published clinical study on something.
Now I'm joking because reaction videos get so many views on YouTube, but it is, my, reaction and analysis of this new study that came out. It's groundbreaking and I think we need to push more in this direction. If anything, it's a good sign that GLP ones are here to stay. One, because they're financially entrenched in our system now in the stock market and pharmaceutical companies and everything. Time will tell how that plays out in population, how people get access to it, and how affordable it is. That is not for me to decide. But what is really cool is like I talked about, if we look at healing people and healing disease, when we go upstream, it stops a lot of the downstream things.
And instead of instead of letting the body get to a point where it has cancer, it's has heart disease or whatever, why don't we use some of these therapies in a preventative manner and a manner that is an adjunct to all of the things that we do from a healthy lifestyle standpoint in order to improve health outcomes and improve longevity, improve aging, and prove all those things. And that's what GLP-1s represent, that what peptide therapy represents, hormone therapy represent. So the GLPs are a critical piece, a cornerstone if you will, in this area.
And I'm so excited to see where this is going to go, because I think cancer is just the tip of the iceberg. Some of these other things that we're going see that they end up doing are going be really powerful and really profound. I am excited where to this goes as better and better GLPs, triseptide, retitrutide even some of them ones that will be in the future will come out and continue to help heal. Ultimately that's what this about is helping people be more healthy so they can become the highest realized version of themselves. Thank you guys so much. I would just close out, I have so many gratitude in my heart for everyone that follows, likes, comments, subscribe, using my codes,
whatever it is that you're associating me with, even as from far away. Thank You guys. So much I remember the days that I used to drive around in the real estate world, going between appointments, listening to health podcasts, And thinking, man, it would be so cool if one day I got to do that and bring information to people, because that's what I did in my free time was talk about health to. I would. Be on real estate appointments, talking to about peptides or supplements or something of that nature, or why they should not eat seed oils. So thank you guys so much.
It is literally, when I look back, as a dream come true that I get to this and maybe you're driving around in your car right now. maybe between a real estate appointment if you're working in real state or maybe you were just on the way to work or whatever it is. And the fact that little old me gets to bring information to you guys and help your life in some way and maybe even make it more enjoyable is literally a dream come true. The fact I get to do that now, that this is what I live out is an incredible blessing and honor and privilege and I take that really seriously.
And I want you guys to know that and know how grateful I am for doing so. So whatever way it is that you support me again, be on the email list, like share, comment, subscribe on all the videos. Um, I truly mean that. And it. Is the greatest gift to me. Again, Like I said, plan on doing this for many more years to come. Thank you so much. That's it for this one and I'll talk to you the next one. Peace.
