Q&A: GLP-1s Are Reshaping Diabetes Care and Pharmacy’s Clinical Role

As glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) medications continue to revolutionize the pharmaceutical landscape, they too are redefining the pharmacist’s clinical role in guiding patients well beyond just diabetes care.

“Since we’re seeing so many drugs that are beneficial in different areas like obesity, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, that type of thing, we as health professionals—doctors, nurses, nutritionists, pharmacists—we need to look at the patient as a whole,” Staci-Marie Norman, PharmD, CDCES, FAPhA, a recently retired pharmacist and diabetes specialist at Martin’s Pharmacy in Indiana, told Drug Topics®. “If I’m a cardiologist looking at the heart, if I’m a nephrologist looking at the kidney, endocrinologist at the diabetes, we need to be looking at the whole.”

Both Norman and her colleague, Susan Cornell, PharmD, CDCES, FAPhA, FADCES, clinical pharmacist and diabetes care and educational specialist at the Bolingbrook Christian Health and Will-Grundy Medical Clinics in Illinois, believe that whole patient health is the current approach for best improving health outcomes. However, they also agree that specific drug classes, like GLP-1s, offer immense benefits alone, making the pharmacist a steward for successful medication use and a shepherd for getting patients to their goals.

Read through part 2 of our interview with Norman and Cornell, who discuss the power of GLP-1s and the importance of whole-person-health approaches in pharmacy amid rapid novel drug development.

READ MORE: GLP-1s Made Up Eight Of Every 100 Prescriptions Filled in March 2026

Drug Topics: While GLP-1 receptor agonists have taken over in both the diabetes and weight-loss spaces, how has the arrival of this medication class both negatively and positively affected your work as a diabetes care specialist?

Staci-Marie Norman: I have to say, being in community pharmacy and a diabetes educator, [GLP-1s have] been a wonderful tool. It’s great at lowering the blood glucose. It’s great at helping with weight management. But then, we have the cardiovascular benefits, the benefits with the kidneys. There are so many others that are being looked at, like retinopathy and lower extremity amputations; possibly having effect with that.

There are so many wonderful things about the medications; it’s just making sure that we’re picking the right one for the right patient. There’s also this push to use them from the patients themselves; they’ve seen the advertisements. But [for] some patients, it’s really not the right thing for them. If they have risk of thyroid cancer or pancreatitis, it might not be the right medication for them. Making sure that we’re getting the right medicine for the right patient is really super important. I think that there’s great benefits for the GLP-1s and they’re wonderful for our arsenal of medications.

Susan Cornell: Staci, you bring up a good point because a GLP-1; they’re very popular right now, of course. I always say, ‘Hollywood made it popular, social media made it popular,’ but not in a good way. So many people are misusing these drugs, which is worrisome because then the person with diabetes who needs the medication for their diabetes and weight loss to prevent their complications may not be able to get it. You [may] have someone who wants to lose 5 pounds because they’re going to a wedding, or they have an event to do, and they need to lose that 5 or 10 vanity pounds.

These drugs are really for people who need a lot of weight loss. But the thing is, they bring on more than just weight loss. They help with cardiovascular, kidney disease, liver; they’re improving so many other things. But again, for some people with diabetes, believe it or not, they don’t need to lose weight. Oftentimes we see older people. I see many older people with type 2; they’ve been living with type 2 for a long time, and really, they can’t afford weight loss. They might be 5 or 10 pounds over their ideal body weight, but they really don’t need to lose the muscle mass either. I know there’s a big controversy over is the GLP causing the muscle wasting or is it losing weight that is causing the muscle wasting? So, [it’s] the chicken and the egg story here, which we don’t have the answer to. [The] bottom line is we do have some people whose weight loss would not be beneficial for them. Again, tailoring the right drug to the right person is very important.

But going back to how this has impacted my work as a diabetes care specialist, I will tell you, these drugs are wonderful. The number of people achieving their goals and feeling better is just phenomenal. If we think back before the GLP-1s and the SGLT2s, we had many drugs that caused weight gain—insulin, sulfonylureas.

Metformin, although weight neutral, had a lot of uncomfortable GI side effects that stayed with you. Where we contrast that now with the GLP-1s—yes, they do have some GI side effects—but they’re short-lived overall. People feel better because they’ve lost weight, they’ve lowered their sugar, they’re breathing better, they have more energy. It’s a win-win situation across the board. Again, for the people who are truly candidates, these drugs are game changers. They are making life with diabetes manageable for so many people. The right drug for the right person I think is critical.

Drug Topics: As new drug developments release, many prominent patient conditions are seemingly overlapping with each other—such as diabetes, obesity, and even mental health being treated simultaneously. How does this overlap highlight the current shifts in the greater health care continuum and what should pharmacists do to prepare for what’s to come in the future?

Susan Cornell: Years ago, we focused on diabetes in a silo. I always joke, back in the day when I graduated pharmacy school and the dinosaurs were around and everything, it was all about the pancreas and it was diabetes. But today, here we are decades later and there’s no such thing as a person with just diabetes. Diabetes goes hand in hand—and obviously we’re holding a lot of hands here—with cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease, cognitive function. Diabetes has been linked to Alzheimer’s.

I think as we start to see the expansion of continuous glucose monitors (CGM), we’re going to see glucose variability decrease, which will also improve cognitive function. We have to remember that drugs don’t always fix the problem, but drugs help to do that. Lifestyle is critical to managing diabetes. No matter what type of diabetes you have, lifestyle is the cornerstone. Drugs are always added to lifestyle, but when we talk about lifestyle, knowing what to eat and exercise and stress and sleep and all of that plays a big role.

If you knew what your blood glucose was every minute of the day, you could actually make informed decisions about your lifestyle. I believe the CGM is the game changer in helping us to improve that glycemic variability. But then when we add the drugs onto it, and of course moving forward as many of these new drugs come out, you’re seeing more and more of how many of them improve time in range. One of the markers in clinical trials now is CGM—time in range. Did drug A versus drug B get us to better time in range? The reason that’s important is, again, that’s improving the overall health of people.

When we talk mental health, glucose fluctuations really play havoc on our mental health, on our brain. Think about it, you’ve got a dreary day, you eat comfort food, your sugar spikes, you don’t want to do anything. It really plays a lot into the day-to-day activities that people actually face with this. I think that’s what we’re going to start to see that it’s not only the drugs but the technology coming down the pipe. You put the 2 together, and that’s how we improve health.

Staci-Marie Norman: Since we’re seeing so many drugs that are beneficial in different areas like obesity, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, that type of thing, we as health professionals—doctors, nurses, nutritionists, pharmacists—we need to look at the patient as a whole. If I’m a cardiologist looking at the heart, if I’m a nephrologist looking at the kidney, endocrinologist at the diabetes, we need to be looking at the whole. I think that’s where we’re really kind of lacking at this point.

Actually, ADA this year made it a point to say that we need to be looking at the patient as a whole, every health care professional. I think that will be beneficial. But really, what health care professional gets to see the patient as a whole? The pharmacist. We get to see their diabetes medications, their cardiovascular medications, their kidney medications. We see all of that. We can have a huge impact on those patients by taking them as a whole and not looking at one specific thing at a time.

READ MORE: Diabetes Resource Center

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