My name is Erik Nelson. I'm at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana. I'm a professor there, and our research involves looking at how cholesterol, cholesterol homeostasis, and regulation of cholesterol influenced immune cells, particularly in the environment of cancer. At the Endocrinology Society this year, 2026, I'm the basic science chair. So, I take care of all the basic science programming. And then for 2027, I'm the overall chair.So, this year's program was absolutely outstanding. We had over 7,000 registrants. We had a record-breaking number of abstract submissions.Some of the major themes came across in the plenary sessions. The Endocrine Society really supports research and clinical enterprise into obesity. And so, we had talks on the new GLP1, GIP agonist drugs that everyone's taking to help treat diabetes or obesity.We had sessions from bench-to-bedside stories, going from basic science research and how that evolved into drugs that are now in the clinic.One of our plenary sessions was by Dan Drucker who gave a great overview of how GLP-1 and GLP-1 receptor was first found and first found to have effects on insulin secretion in mice and how that's evolved over the last couple decades into drugs that are taken by many, many different people. And then also how we had all these unexpected beneficial side effects, so improvements of cardiovascular health and improvements on other things. And then some even more tangential things like their use potentially as a way to reduce substance abuse. So, I thought that was fantastic.GLP1 Receptor Agonists and the Risk of Significant Hypotension Among Patients with Metabolic Cardiovascular Renal Disease: Too Much of A Good Thing?My name is Micah Immer. I am a general cardiologist with Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. I practice general cardiology and see patients with all sorts of disorders of the heart and vasculature.I presented a study at Endo 2026, which looked at the incidence of hypotension or low blood pressure among patients who were started on GLPs who also were on medication for high blood pressure.So, this is a pretty common scenario in the cardiology world. GLPs have many benefits for patients with heart disease, and so we like to use them.What I had noticed was in the clinic that a certain number of patients were getting low blood pressure after this combination of medicine and having things like falls and fainting and recording very low blood pressures. And I wanted to know if this was a real thing and if there were patients that we could identify that might have this experience.So, we used our electronical medical record system here to look for patients who were over 18, who were started on a GLP, and who were also on at least two medications for high blood pressure.We came up with a group of about 40,000 patients that we looked at and tried to look at them, you know, when they started the GLP, and then compared that to six months prior to the GLP, and then six, 12, 24 months after the GLP. So, the patients served as their own controls.What we found is that in a significant number of patients, almost 20%, did experience some hypotensive episodes, whether it's feeling lightheaded, feeling dizzy, fainting, falling or recording just a very low blood pressure, almost 20% of patients at two years had had an experience like that. The other interesting piece of information is that we found that patients who are over 65 and patients who had diabetes were at particularly high risk of having these outcomes. And so, you know, I always worry about older patients, just in general, but when you start adding medications, I think they're more susceptible to side effects.Patients with diabetes, why did they have more problems? I'm guessing maybe they have some degree of dysautonomia where their blood pressure regulation isn't quite right to begin with and maybe that makes them more susceptible. But I think I think we need more information to find out exactly why this is happening to people.For clinicians, I think what I wanted to accomplish was to say, hey, just keep an eye out for these certain people, right?When patients are on this combination, which is GLPs plus at least two blood pressure lowering medicines, be aware that they may have low blood pressure episodes and you may need to adjust their medication, whether that means reducing or stopping the low blood pressure medicine, or reducing or stopping the GLP if the symptoms are significant enough.The next steps I think are several. One is it would be interesting to figure out what the mechanism is. Like why are these people getting hy hypotension? And the obvious answer is they're losing weight, right?So, we know that even if you lose 5% of your body weight, you'll see a significant drop in your blood pressure. But I don't think that's the whole story. and when we looked at the statistics for this, just accounting for the weight loss in the in the patients. It didn't explain the full change in their blood pressure. So, I think there are other mechanisms at play,I'd also like to know if we just said all blood pressure medicine, but maybe it's specific ones, right? Like we know that the GLPs interact with the renin aldosterone system. Maybe blood pressure medicines that do the same thing, it's too much. So, I think we need more information on are there specific medications. And then also more information about patients, which types of patients are at risk..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter