REVISION LOG — 2 ENTRIESMOST RECENT: 2026-10-07
- 2026-10-07CORRECTION — source links. Two sources opened the wrong paper: Neeland et al. (Diabetes Obes Metab 2024) linked to an unrelated chemistry paper, and Eisa et al. (Diabetes Obes Metab 2026; 20 RCTs, n=15,782) linked to a post hoc analysis of tirzepatide withdrawal. Each now links to the cited article (PMIDs 38937282, 41877354). Correction only, not a re-audit.
- 2026-08-30Initial dossier issued. Grades an evidence base rather than a compound: the precise literature query returned zero indexed results, and that emptiness is reported as the primary finding. Efficacy graded Tier B from phase 3 subgroups in women 65+; bone and muscle costs graded Tier C as plausible-but-unmeasured. The widely repeated '70% of GLP-1 users are menopausal women' figure was deliberately excluded — untraceable to peer review, and it happens to support our own thesis, which is exactly why it was held to a higher bar.
Every entry above was written when the change was made, not reconstructed afterwards. Where we were wrong, the wrong version is named.
This dossier grades an absence. Women in the menopausal transition are among the heaviest users of incretin therapy, and the pivotal trials were not designed to answer anything about them. We ran the search: a PubMed query combining GLP-1 agonists, postmenopausal women, body composition, bone and lean mass returned ZERO indexed results — not few, none. A semantic search across the peer-reviewed corpus surfaced three papers, of which one is a narrative review of women over 65, one is a case report of a single patient, and one is a general lean-mass paper that is not menopause-specific at all. Broadening the query returns breast-cancer literature and a study in ovariectomised mice. What that thin base does support is that the drug still works here — 10–20% sustained loss in women 65+, with cardiometabolic improvement. What it does not support is any statement about the skeletal and muscular cost in a body already losing bone. The market has filled that vacuum with confident instruction. We are publishing the shape of the hole instead.
- ›Read this as a map of where the evidence ends, not as a protocol. There is no menopause-specific incretin protocol worth the name, and anyone publishing one is extrapolating.
- ›If you are in this window and on — or considering — an incretin, the bone question belongs in the appointment. Baseline DXA before starting, and a repeat at one year rather than the customary two-to-three, is the conservative reading of thin evidence.
- ›The resistance substrate is the one intervention that is well supported everywhere else and plausibly matters more here. It does not require this dossier's evidence to justify it — it stands on its own.
- ›Distrust confidence on this subject in either direction, including reassurance. The volume of content on it is inversely proportional to the data behind it.
The operator who reads this stops mistaking silence for safety. The absence of published harm in this population is not evidence of absence — nobody looked. That changes what she asks her physician: not 'is this safe for me', which has no trial answer, but 'what are we going to measure, and how often, given that the trials did not measure it'. That is a question a clinician can actually act on, and it is available to anyone regardless of what they can afford.
Certainty ends almost immediately, which is the point. Efficacy in older women rests on subgroup data reported through a narrative rather than systematic review. The bone signal rests on a single case report plus expert reasoning — it is a monitoring argument, not a demonstrated outcome. Nothing here establishes that incretins are more dangerous in the menopausal transition than elsewhere; equally, nothing establishes that they are not. Interaction with hormone therapy, effect on vasomotor symptoms, and any menopause-specific dosing are entirely ungraded because no controlled evidence exists to grade. This dossier is an audit of a literature, not of a drug, and it will be rewritten the moment the literature earns it.