Scroll a Dubai wellness account for more than a minute and a weight-loss injection ad finds you. The pen glints under studio light, the caption promises over 20 per cent of your body weight gone, in 90 per cent of cases, and the price line reads something like Ozempic from AED 1,600, as though a diabetes medicine and a weight-management drug were two flavours of the same syringe.
Across the Dubai clinic menus and booking flows we checked, that mix-up is closer to the rule than the exception. One clinic's own page states plainly that Ozempic carries an FDA approval for chronic weight management. It does not. That approval belongs to Wegovy, a different, higher-dose semaglutide product with its own registered indication. Another clinic prices Ozempic at AED 1,600 to 2,000 and Wegovy at AED 1,800 to 2,500 on the same page, one line apart, treating a diabetes drug and a weight-management drug as interchangeable depending on what is in stock. A third publishes, unattributed, that its Wegovy patients see over 20 per cent body weight loss in 90 per cent of cases, a claim no trial in this drug class supports.
That is not illegal marketing copy in the loose, moral sense the phrase usually carries in this industry. It is illegal in the specific, written-down sense, because since 2 January 2025 the UAE has had a federal law governing exactly this: what a clinic may prescribe off-label, and what it may advertise on social media. Two of that law's articles land directly on the weight-loss injection trade as it is actually sold in Dubai. We read all 73 pages of it, and no clinic page we found mentions either.
There is also a newer development that makes the marketing gap harder to justify with every month that passes. As of September 2026 there are three medicines registered in the UAE specifically for weight management, not two, and one arrived as a tablet the UAE got before almost anywhere else on earth. That changes the honest answer to the question every reader actually wants answered: should you be on the diabetes pen, the weight-management pen, or the pill, and what does any of it actually cost once the drug, the consultation and the monitoring are all counted.
The law that changed in January 2025
Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2024, governing medical products, pharmacists and pharmaceutical establishments, entered into force on 2 January 2025. It repealed the previous federal medicines law entirely and created the Emirates Drug Establishment, the EDE, as the country's medicines regulator. Two of its articles are worth reading slowly if you are considering an injection.
Article 42 permits off-label prescribing, but only under three conditions that all have to be true at once: the prescription must be necessary, there must be no equivalent alternative available, and the patient must approve it. Apply that to Ozempic. It is semaglutide, licensed in the UAE for type 2 diabetes. Its leaflet does not carry weight management as an indication, so prescribing it to someone without diabetes, purely for weight loss, is a new use not covered by the label, lawful only if no equivalent alternative exists. As of this year, one does. Wegovy, the weight-management-indicated semaglutide, exists in the UAE in both injectable and, since June 2026, tablet form, and a second oral weight-loss medicine, Foundayo, has been registered since April. The clause built to permit an occasional, genuinely necessary exception is now the hardest part of the test for a routine Ozempic-for-weight-loss prescription to satisfy, because the alternative it asks the prescriber to have ruled out plainly exists on a UAE pharmacy shelf.
Article 44 covers advertising. It is prohibited to advertise, publicise or promote a medical product by any means, including social media, without prior approval from the EDE, and any approval that is granted requires the material to reflect only the medicine's approved use and to clearly disclose its risks and side effects. An Ozempic post that shows weight loss does not reflect Ozempic's approved use. A Wegovy or Mounjaro post that never mentions a side effect does not meet the disclosure condition either.
The penalty sits in Article 165, and it is not a warning letter. Breaching Article 42's clauses on off-label prescribing, or Article 44 in full, carries six months to one year of imprisonment and a fine of AED 50,000 to AED 200,000, or either penalty. Nothing in our research shows a named Dubai clinic has been prosecuted or fined under these articles for a weight-loss case, and this article makes no claim that one has. What the law gives a reader is a checkable standard, not an accusation to make on its behalf.
FEDERAL DECREE-LAW NO. 38 OF 2024
The off-label test
Three conditions, all required
- 1
- The prescription must be necessary
- 2
- No equivalent alternative may be available
- 3
- The patient must approve
The valid prescription
Article 76
- Must show
- Prescriber name, seal, signature and date
- Must record
- The patient's full name, age, weight and phone number
- Must state
- Scientific or trade name, form, dose and duration of use
The advertisement
Article 44 and 45
- Requires
- Prior EDE approval, valid for 30 days to one year
- Must disclose
- Risks and side effects, stated clearly (Article 45.4)
- Must reflect
- Only the medicine's approved use
The penalty
Article 165
- For breaching Article 42 or 44
- 6 months to 1 year imprisonment
- Fine
- AED 50,000 to AED 200,000, or either penalty
There is one useful, unglamorous line buried in Article 76: a lawful UAE prescription has to record the patient's weight. It is a small, checkable fact on a piece of paper you are entitled to hold. If a clinic hands you a pen with no such paperwork, that alone is worth pausing over.
The consultation-desk version of all this reduces to one question. Is the medicine you are prescribing me licensed in the UAE for weight loss, or for diabetes. And if it is the diabetes one, what is the equivalent alternative you ruled out. A doctor prescribing a licensed weight-management medicine answers that in one sentence. A clinic reaching for the diabetes pen because it is cheaper or easier to source has to answer a question its own regulator wrote for exactly this situation.
Three registered options now, not two
The reason that question has teeth in 2026 is that the UAE's own approvals have moved faster than most Dubai clinic pages have updated their copy. On 3 April 2026 the EDE approved Foundayo, orforglipron, Eli Lilly's oral GLP-1, making the UAE the second country in the world to authorise it, available in pharmacies from May. On 1 June 2026, the EDE approved the Wegovy pill, oral semaglutide, for long-term weight management in adults with obesity or overweight linked to a weight-related condition. Novo Nordisk's own release calls the UAE the first country outside the United States to get it, citing a company trial, OASIS 4, reporting roughly 17 per cent mean weight loss when treatment was adhered to, a qualifier worth keeping attached, since it describes an on-treatment result rather than what every enrolled patient achieved.
By the time you are reading this, a UAE patient who wants a medically supervised GLP-1, without going near a diabetes-indicated product at all, has three registered routes: injectable Wegovy, the Wegovy tablet, and Foundayo. Liraglutide, sold as Saxenda, has been UAE-registered for weight management for years and was always, in principle, an equivalent alternative to Ozempic under Article 42. What has changed is not that an alternative now exists, but that the newer options are materially closer in efficacy to the diabetes pen a clinic might otherwise reach for, which makes "no equivalent alternative" a harder sentence for a prescriber to defend with a straight face than it was when the only registered alternative was the oldest, mildest drug in the class. The equivalent alternative the law asks a prescriber to have ruled out is no longer theoretical, and now it is not just cheaper and weaker. It has a box number, a pharmacy price, and, for two of the three, trial results close to the diabetes pen's own.
The two tablets are not interchangeable with each other, which is worth knowing before you ask which one to try. Oral semaglutide has to be taken fasted, with a small sip of water, and a wait of at least thirty minutes before eating anything else, an absorption quirk that is awkward to fit around a working day. Foundayo, a small-molecule drug rather than a peptide, is marketed on exactly that difference: no fasting, no water restriction, taken any time.
The conversation that actually matters happens before the prescription pad comes out, and it is the one about which drug you are legally the right candidate for.
What the drugs do, and what they cost to reach the dose that works
Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and liraglutide (Saxenda) are GLP-1 receptor agonists: they mimic a gut hormone that slows how fast your stomach empties, turns up satiety signalling in the brain, and improves insulin secretion. Tirzepatide (Mounjaro) adds a second incretin pathway on top of that, a dual GIP/GLP-1 mechanism, which is the pharmacological reason its trial results run higher than semaglutide's at comparable doses. Foundayo works on the same GLP-1 receptor as the injectables but is chemically unrelated to them, a tablet rather than a peptide.
None of these drugs start at their effective dose. Wegovy titrates from 0.25mg weekly up to a 2.4mg maintenance dose over roughly sixteen to twenty weeks. Mounjaro climbs in 2.5mg steps roughly every four weeks toward a 5mg, 10mg or 15mg maintenance dose. Saxenda, the oldest and cheapest of the group on most Dubai menus, is a daily injection titrating from 0.6mg to a 3.0mg maintenance dose. That matters for your wallet as much as your body: every published Dubai price prices each dose strength separately, and no clinic page states a single fixed cost for the whole climb to maintenance. Ask your clinic to write the full titration out for you, dose by dose, before you sign anything.
The number the trials report, and the number a UAE hospital actually recorded
Every Dubai clinic page we found quotes trial efficacy. What almost none of them tell you is how that compares with what actually happens once real UAE patients, on real schedules, with real gaps in follow-up, take these drugs outside a clinical trial's structure.
THE TRIAL NUMBER VS THE REAL ONE
STEP 1, the pivotal semaglutide trial, followed 1,961 adults with obesity or overweight for 68 weeks and reported a mean 14.9 per cent weight loss, against 2.4 per cent on placebo. SURMOUNT-1 followed a similar population on tirzepatide for 72 weeks and reported 16.0, 21.4 and 22.5 per cent mean loss at the 5mg, 10mg and 15mg doses. Those are the figures on every price page.
The real-world figure comes from a study published in April 2026 in BMC Endocrine Disorders, reviewing 238 patient records and 1,744 pharmacy dispensing records at Thumbay University Hospital, a tertiary teaching hospital in Ajman. Of the 143 patients with roughly seven months of follow-up, mean weight loss was 3.91 per cent. Only 35.6 per cent reached the clinically meaningful five per cent threshold, and 25.1 per cent actually gained weight. The authors' own conclusion: observed outcomes in this real-world setting were more modest than those reported in controlled clinical trials, and the trials' own maximal effects were generally seen after around 52 weeks, longer than this dataset's follow-up. Forty per cent of the original cohort had no follow-up recorded at all, a pattern the authors attribute in part to people stopping treatment early.
That gap between 3.91 per cent and the trial's mid-teens to low-twenties is not a contradiction. It is the difference between a controlled trial with mandated visits and a full run to the maintenance dose, against ordinary Dubai clinic life: shorter follow-up, real-world adherence, and, per the study's own note, some patients using the drug without a formal diabetes or obesity diagnosis on file. Report both numbers, because either alone is misleading. This is a single Ajman hospital's data, not a national UAE statistic, and should be read as the strongest available UAE-specific figure rather than a nationwide average.
What happens the year after you stop
This is the part almost no clinic conversation covers, and it is the one that decides whether the money you spend this year buys you anything durable.
STOP THE INJECTION, AND THEN WHAT
The STEP 1 extension followed a subset of the original trial participants for a further year, after treatment and the lifestyle support that came with it stopped at week 68. By that point the semaglutide group had lost 17.3 per cent of their starting weight. A year after stopping, they had regained 11.6 percentage points of it, a net loss of 5.6 per cent from baseline, roughly two-thirds of the loss coming back within twelve months. The trial authors' own framing is unusually blunt for a clinical paper: the findings confirm the chronicity of obesity, and ongoing treatment is required to maintain improvements in weight and health.
SURMOUNT-4 ran a comparable design on tirzepatide. Participants took the drug for 36 weeks, then were randomised to continue it or switch to placebo for a further 52 weeks. Those who continued added a further 5.5 to 6.7 per cent loss, reaching roughly 26 per cent total by week 88. Those switched to placebo regained a mean 14.0 per cent over that same 52 weeks, and 82 per cent regained more than a quarter of what they had lost.
Read together, the two trials say the same thing in different drugs: the regain is driven by stopping, not by some failure of the drug class itself, and a course of injections sold as a fixed-length "programme" is, on this evidence, treating a chronic condition as though it had an end date.
The warning nobody on the price page mentions
Every GLP-1 label in this class, semaglutide, tirzepatide and liraglutide alike, carries the same boxed warning. It is a contraindication, the strongest category a drug label has, not a side effect listed further down the page.
WHAT THE LABEL SAYS, WHAT THE PAGE SAYS
The FDA boxed warning
Contraindicated for MEN2 and MTC
- Exact label text
- Contraindicated in patients with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma, or in patients with Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2
- Applies to
- Semaglutide, tirzepatide and liraglutide products alike
What five Dubai pages disclosed
None of them
- Checked directly
- Dynamic Clinic, Glamorous Clinic, Novomed, Euromed, Royal Clinic Dubai
- Finding
- Zero of the five mention MEN2 or thyroid cancer risk anywhere on the pricing or information page
The Ozempic indication mix-up
Novomed's own page
- What it says
- States Ozempic has FDA approval as chronic weight management
- What is actually approved for that
- That is Wegovy's indication, not Ozempic's, which is registered for type 2 diabetes
An unattributed efficacy claim
Glamorous Clinic's Wegovy page
- What it says
- "Over 20% body weight loss in 90% of cases"
- What the trial data shows
- SURMOUNT-1 (tirzepatide, a different drug) reports up to 39.7% of patients reaching 25% loss at its top dose. No sourced semaglutide or Wegovy trial in this report supports a 90% figure
The finding behind that table sits directly on top of Article 44's disclosure requirement quoted earlier. In rodent studies, semaglutide caused a dose- and duration-dependent increase in thyroid C-cell tumours at clinically relevant exposures. Whether that translates to human risk is stated as unknown on the label itself, which is why the contraindication exists rather than a milder caution. Patients are told to report a neck mass, difficulty swallowing, shortness of breath or persistent hoarseness as possible symptoms. Of the five Dubai clinic pages we checked directly, none mentioned any of it. If a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or MEN2 has never come up in your consultation, raise it yourself before the first injection rather than after.
A thyroid history question and a set of baseline bloods take five minutes. Almost no Dubai price page mentions either as part of what you are paying for.
Beyond the boxed warning, the gastrointestinal side effects, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, constipation, are near-universal, most pronounced while the dose is climbing, and consistent across every label and every clinic page we read. Pancreatitis is a labelled warning across the class, and gallbladder disease risk rises with rapid weight loss from any cause, GLP-1s included. We found no UAE-specific rate for either. Report the label warnings as label warnings, not as a measured UAE incidence, because no such incidence has been published.
The AED number, and what it is actually paying for
Here is the honest starting point on price. Under Federal Decree-Law 38/2024, every registered medicine in the UAE has one federally set pharmacy price. The variation you see scrolling between clinic pages is not variation in the drug. It is variation in the programme wrapped around it: the consultation fee, the markup on the pen itself, and whatever monitoring is or is not bundled in.
READ THE PRICE PAGE
Royal Clinic Dubai
Ozempic from AED 1,800
- VAT
- Stated elsewhere on the site as plus 5 percent
- Form
- Single open-ended starting figure, not a dose-by-dose table
Novomed
Ozempic pen AED 740 to 1,150
- Consultation
- AED 500 to 1,000, priced separately
- Monthly programme
- AED 1,500 to 3,500 plus, depending on inclusions
- VAT
- Not stated on the pricing lines
Dynamic Clinic
Four drugs, one price table
- Ozempic
- AED 1,600 to 2,000 by dose
- Wegovy
- AED 1,800 to 2,500 by dose
- Mounjaro
- AED 2,700 to 3,700 by dose
- VAT
- Disclosed on only one package line out of the whole table
Endocare Clinic
Packages, not pens
- Ozempic package
- From AED 1,990 a month
- Mounjaro package
- From AED 2,990 a month
- Stated inclusions
- Consultations, coaching, body-composition scans, delivery
Reading that table across a full course rather than one month is where the real number appears. Take Novomed's own stated range: a pen at AED 740 to 1,150 plus a consultation of AED 500 to 1,000, before any monitoring. Six months at even the lower end, with no dose increase, runs past AED 7,000. Most patients do increase the dose over that period, since the maintenance level is the whole point of titrating there, and every dose increase on every published table costs more than the one before it. A twelve-month course that reaches and holds maintenance, with a monthly consultation and no monitoring beyond what a package bundles in, lands most Dubai patients somewhere in the AED 18,000 to 35,000 range across the year, an indicative estimate rather than a quote, since no clinic we read publishes a full-course total. Endocare's packaged model, from AED 1,990 to 2,990 a month, is the clearest attempt at an all-in monthly figure, and even that does not state whether VAT sits inside or outside it.
VAT is the smallest, most fixable gap on almost every page. Only Royal Clinic Dubai states it clearly, at 5 per cent, and only one Dynamic Clinic package line mentions it at all. Ask for the VAT-inclusive figure in writing before you commit, because a silent 5 per cent on a AED 30,000 annual course is AED 1,500 you did not budget for.
Insurance rarely closes that gap. Per Khaleej Times, sourced to Burjeel Holdings' chief pharmacy officer and a pharmacy manager at International Modern Hospital, Ozempic and Mounjaro are often covered when prescribed for their licensed diabetes indication, subject to clinical criteria. Coverage for the weight-management indication is limited across most standard plans, and Wegovy specifically is generally excluded unless a premium policy extends benefit because obesity is linked to another covered condition. No DHA or DoH circular naming a mandatory obesity-treatment benefit was found, so treat this as the best available reporting, not a regulator's rule.
The clinics that fold nutrition coaching and monitoring into the same monthly fee are, on the honest reading of the trial and regain data above, pricing the part of the treatment that actually decides whether the loss holds.
There is a delivery-model warning worth carrying alongside the price. Speaking to Khaleej Times, Ali Hashemi, co-founder of metabolic.health, put the risk plainly: the problem with click, pay, deliver models is doses escalated too quickly, inadequate education on side effects, limited screening for contraindications, and no real follow-up. Dr Sami Mohammed Yesuf, quoted in the same piece, framed it as a delivery-model risk rather than a medication risk, since packaging a prescription medicine alongside same-day delivery frames it as convenience rather than care. Weigh both against a package price that looks unusually cheap for what it claims to include.
Fasting on the injection, or the pill
Weight-loss GLP-1s and Ramadan collide every year, and it is a genuine, common UAE question with an actual, attributable answer, something no Dubai clinic page we read addresses at all.
RAMADAN, ON THE INJECTION OR THE PILL
Weekly injection timing
Shortly after iftar
- Why
- The body is rehydrated by then
- Avoid
- Suhoor dosing, in case gastrointestinal discomfort hits during fasting hours with no fluids available
Oral tablet timing
At suhoor, fasted
- Rule
- 30 minutes before eating
- Alternative
- After Taraweeh, with a 2 to 3 hour gap from food
Hypoglycaemia
Break the fast under 70 mg/dL
- Highest risk
- Combined with insulin or other glucose-lowering medicines
Dehydration
200 to 300ml an hour
- Why it is missed
- GLP-1s blunt thirst signalling, so patients underestimate how little they are drinking
- Method
- A steady sip strategy between iftar and suhoor, not one large volume
Before Ramadan starts
A dedicated consultation
- What it covers
- Bloodwork and tolerance review
- Possible outcome
- A doctor may advise against fasting altogether
That guidance comes from Dr Yousef Said, Medical Director at Metabolic Health, quoted in Khaleej Times in February 2026, and it is one doctor's clinical advice reported in one publication, not a DHA or EDE standard. It is still the most specific, locally relevant safety guidance available on the topic, and it costs nothing to ask your own prescriber whether they follow the same approach before your first Ramadan on the drug.
Who is actually allowed to prescribe this, and where the rules go quiet
GLP-1 medicines in the UAE are prescription-only, dispensed against a valid prescription by a licensed pharmacy, from a DHA-licensed doctor. A nutritionist or dietitian cannot prescribe one. Beyond that, the picture thins out. No single DHA scope-of-practice document naming GLP-1s specifically was located, and no source distinguishes a general practitioner's authority to prescribe one from a specialist's. The phrase aesthetic doctor does not appear anywhere in connection with lawful GLP-1 prescribing in the UAE. That is not a claim that any particular prescriber is unqualified. It is an absence: the scope-of-practice question a reader would most want answered has no single published DHA document to point to.
Telehealth adds a further wrinkle. DHA's Standards for Telehealth Services, version 4, effective from November 2025, excludes the prescribing of narcotic, controlled or semi-controlled medication from telehealth consultations altogether. What our research could not establish is whether semaglutide, tirzepatide or liraglutide are classified as controlled or semi-controlled under UAE drug schedules. We are not asserting that this clause bars telehealth GLP-1 prescribing, because we cannot confirm it does. We are handing you the question to put to any online-only weight-loss platform instead: is this medicine classified as controlled or semi-controlled, and if it is, how is a video consultation lawful under your own regulator's telehealth exclusion.
When the answer is no
The class-wide contraindications are worth stating plainly rather than burying in a leaflet. A personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or MEN2 rules out the whole class. So does pregnancy or breastfeeding. A history of pancreatitis is a caution requiring closer monitoring, not an automatic bar. Per the labels and the EDE-referenced indications, the weight-management products suit adults with a BMI of 30 or above, or 27 or above with a weight-related condition such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, or established cardiovascular disease. There is no published UAE-specific eligibility standard beyond those drug labels, unlike, say, DHA's dedicated hair transplant patient standard.
Common questions
Is Ozempic approved for weight loss in the UAE, or only for diabetes?
Only for diabetes. Its registered UAE indication is type 2 diabetes. Weight loss is an off-label use, permitted only when the drug is necessary, no equivalent alternative is available, and the patient consents, per Article 42 of Federal Decree-Law 38/2024. With Wegovy and Foundayo now registered for weight management, the "no equivalent alternative" branch of that test is harder to satisfy than it was in 2024.
What is the difference between Ozempic and Wegovy?
Both are semaglutide. Ozempic is licensed for type 2 diabetes at a lower maximum dose. Wegovy is licensed for weight management at a higher, 2.4mg maintenance dose, and exists in the UAE as both an injection and, since June 2026, a tablet.
How much do weight-loss injections cost in Dubai?
Published per-pen prices range from roughly AED 740 for a starting Ozempic dose to over AED 3,700 for a higher Mounjaro dose, before consultation or monitoring. Packaged monthly programmes start from around AED 1,990 to 2,990, and a full course to maintenance typically runs into five figures across a year. No clinic page publishes a complete course total, so ask for one in writing.
What happens if you stop taking Ozempic or Mounjaro?
Most of the loss returns. Semaglutide patients regained 11.6 percentage points of a 17.3 per cent loss within a year of stopping, for a net 5.6 per cent. Tirzepatide patients switched to placebo regained a mean 14.0 per cent over 52 weeks. Continuing treatment, in both trials, kept adding loss instead of reversing it.
What is the thyroid cancer warning on these drugs?
A boxed contraindication, the label's strongest category, for anyone with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or MEN2 syndrome. It applies to semaglutide, tirzepatide and liraglutide alike. Of five Dubai clinic pages we checked directly, none disclosed it.
Are weight-loss injections covered by insurance in the UAE?
Often, when prescribed for a genuine diabetes diagnosis and clinical criteria are met. Rarely, when prescribed for weight management alone. Wegovy specifically is generally excluded from standard plans. No DHA or DoH mandatory-benefits circular on obesity medication was found.
Is it safe to fast on weight-loss injections during Ramadan?
Per one UAE doctor's published guidance, weekly injections are best taken shortly after iftar, oral tablets at suhoor or after Taraweeh, and patients should break the fast under 70 mg/dL blood glucose or if severe symptoms appear. A pre-Ramadan consultation reviewing bloodwork is recommended, and for some the advice is not to fast at all.
What is Foundayo, and how is it different from the Wegovy pill?
A different chemical class entirely: a non-peptide, small-molecule GLP-1 approved by the EDE in April 2026. Unlike oral semaglutide, it carries no fasting or water restriction, taken as a tablet at any time.
Who is allowed to prescribe weight-loss injections in Dubai?
A DHA-licensed doctor, against a valid prescription meeting Article 76's requirements, dispensed only through a licensed pharmacy. No published document distinguishes a GP's authority to prescribe a GLP-1 from a specialist's, and whether telehealth's controlled-medication exclusion applies is unconfirmed.
Sources and methodology
Every AED figure here is a UAE clinic's own published price, fetched directly from that clinic's website in September 2026 and attributed to it rather than blended into a market average. Clinical percentages are attributed to the specific trial or study that produced them, with peer-reviewed trial data kept visibly separate from the single UAE real-world figure, which comes from one Ajman teaching hospital and should be read as the strongest available UAE-specific evidence, not a national statistic. Regulatory clauses are quoted from the full text of Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2024 and the DHA Standards for Telehealth Services, both fetched and read in full. We review this article periodically as menus, approvals and regulations change. This is informational content, not individual medical advice. Confirm your eligibility, dosing and cost with a licensed UAE clinic and the physician who would prescribe.
- Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2024, Governing Medical Products, Pharmacists and Pharmaceutical Establishments, MOHAP, in force 2 January 2025
- Emirates Drug Establishment approves oral Wegovy for weight management and cardiovascular risk reduction, EDE, 1 June 2026
- Emirates Drug Establishment approves oral obesity treatment, marking shift away from injections, EDE, on Foundayo
- Wilding JPH et al, Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults with Overweight or Obesity (STEP 1), New England Journal of Medicine, 2021
- Wilding JPH et al, Weight regain and cardiometabolic effects after withdrawal of semaglutide: the STEP 1 trial extension, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 2022
- Jastreboff AM et al, Tirzepatide Once Weekly for the Treatment of Obesity (SURMOUNT-1), New England Journal of Medicine, 2022
- Aronne LJ et al, Continued Treatment With Tirzepatide for Maintenance of Weight Reduction in Adults With Obesity: The SURMOUNT-4 Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA, 2023, with a post hoc cardiometabolic analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine, 2026
- Novo Nordisk, Wegovy pill launches in the UAE as Novo Nordisk expands global access to obesity care, 3 June 2026
- Almemari S et al, Real-world prescribing patterns and early weight and blood pressure outcomes of GLP-1-based therapies in the United Arab Emirates, BMC Endocrine Disorders, 12 April 2026
- Ozempic (semaglutide) injection prescribing information, US Food and Drug Administration
- Standards for Telehealth Services, version 4, Dubai Health Authority, effective 26 November 2025
- Khaleej Times, "Ramadan 2026: Should you fast on GLP-1s? UAE doctor explains", 17 February 2026
- Khaleej Times, "Are Ozempic, Mounjaro, other weight-loss drugs covered by insurance in the UAE?", 27 February 2026
- Khaleej Times, "Non-medical sale of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on the rise; UAE expert warns of risks", 10 February 2026
For non-drug ways to change body shape, we have covered fat-freezing with CoolSculpting and liposuction and tummy tuck surgery separately, and for readers weighing a treatment trip against a local one, Dubai's medical tourism landscape sets out the wider picture. Clinics offering weight-loss injections alongside body contouring, such as Elite Body Home Polyclinic, are listed in our body and contouring directory category, part of the full Bellora directory.