Details up front: 15 mg · dulaglutide.
This is a planning question. I know what my options are; I do not know how to weigh them.
What I want is the minimum viable version, which I suspect is smaller than what I would design.
How do I make this decision on evidence rather than on feel?
15 mg a week is 2.143 mg a day averaged out and 780 mg over a year — but "defensible" is not a property of the number, it is a property of where the number came from. A maintenance dose is defensible when a trial randomised people to it and reported what happened, and indefensible when it was arrived at by interpolation between two doses that were studied. So the question to ask of 15 mg is which arm it corresponds to: if a programme ran 15 mg as a maintenance level, there is an efficacy figure, a tolerability figure and a discontinuation rate attached to it. If it sits between two studied levels, everything said about it is extrapolation, and the burden of that is on whoever proposed it. The other half of the arithmetic is supply: at 15 mg a week a 10 mg vial is 0.67 weeks and you will need about 78 of them a year, which is worth knowing before the dose is settled rather than after. Maintenance doses are set by a prescriber against an individual; nothing here is medical advice.
The relevant observation is that maintenance frequently requires less exposure than the loss phase did, and the trials suggest it rather than establish it.
Maintenance and loss are different endpoints. Loss requires a sustained energy deficit; maintenance requires only that the counter-regulatory drive is offset, and that may need less exposure.
Glycaemic maintenance has a faster and cleaner signal than weight maintenance, particularly with continuous monitoring, which makes the downward search more tractable when glycaemia is the endpoint.
STEP-4 and SURMOUNT-4 evaluated withdrawal rather than dose reduction, which is the limit of the direct evidence on this question.
The caveat is that dose reduction is a clinical decision and this is a description of a search strategy rather than a recommendation.
Search downward, one step, eight weeks each, on a rolling average.
HPLC purity, identity confirmation and quantified content on the vial you actually hold. Reports arrive with the chromatogram attached, not just a number.
Submit a sampleFounded 1998. ISO 9001 and cGMP certified, 1,500+ staff and 200+ patents. The synthesis house behind a great many of the vials that get sent out for testing - batch-specific documentation with every order.
Visit GL BiochemThe short version: reach a working dose, hold it, and then consider whether less would hold it just as well.
A downward search proceeds one step at a time with at least eight weeks at each level, because a weekly agent takes four to five weeks to reach the new steady state and then needs time for the trend to be readable.
It helps to be literal here: if the result deteriorates on a lower dose, returning to the previous one is straightforward and does not require re-titration from the bottom provided the gap has been short.
Dose-response for weight in the trial programmes was real but flattening at the upper end, which is consistent with a lower maintenance requirement.
A noisy weight signal makes premature conclusions easy, in both directions.
The lowest dose that holds the result is the answer, and it is individual.
Start with what is being maintained — weight, glycaemia or both — because they have different dose-response curves.
Weight is a noisy signal. A rolling four-week average is the instrument; single weigh-ins after a dose reduction will show nothing interpretable.
The part that matters: the maintenance dose is not necessarily the same a year later, since the counter-regulatory response attenuates slowly if at all.
The counter-regulatory hormonal response to weight loss persists for at least a year after the loss, which is the physiological reason maintenance needs something rather than nothing.
The withdrawal trials answer stopping, not reducing. Different questions.
To be exact about it, any reduction takes four to five weeks to express itself, so the search proceeds in months.
The withdrawal trials — STEP-4 and SURMOUNT-4 — established what happens when treatment stops entirely. They did not evaluate dose reduction, so the evidence for a lower maintenance dose is inference rather than data.
Inference from the withdrawal trials to dose reduction is inference and should be labelled as such.
Going back up after a short gap does not require re-titrating from the bottom.
Answer first: the maintenance dose is the lowest one that holds the result, and finding it is a downward search rather than an upward one.
Gastrointestinal tolerability generally improves on a reduced dose, which is a genuine quality-of-life argument for the search rather than only a cost one.
Gastrointestinal adverse event rates in the trials are dose-related, which supports the tolerability argument for the lowest effective dose.
Nothing here is medical advice, and research-use compounds are not approved for human use.
Glycaemic maintenance gives a faster signal than weight maintenance.
edited 18 Jun 2026 by lucia_marchetti — removed a claim I could not source
Ask PeptideStack is a static archive. Posting is closed, but the norms are worth stating: answer the question that was asked, show your working, cite the trial or the certificate, and say plainly where the evidence runs out.