Nothing on this site can be bought for a child — every seller in this roster serves adults only, and a prescription for an eight-year-old comes from a pediatrician, not a subscription form. The study is here because the growth figure attached to it is going to be quoted without its base, which is how most real-world prescribing data gets used.
The headline and the base
Prescribing to this age group rose 310-fold between 2019 and 2026. [1] The starting point was 0.03% of children, so the multiplier is doing what a multiplier does to a very small number.
Across the whole cohort of 3.5 million children, 0.6% ever received a prescription. That is uncommon by any reading.
Who is getting them
Older children more than younger: 79.5 per 10,000 at age eleven against 41.5 at age eight. Girls more than boys: 75.9 against 42.8. The paper does not explain the second gap and neither will this page.
The largest difference is clinical. Children who already had an obesity-related condition were prescribed at 188.9 per 10,000, which the authors read as clinicians reserving these drugs for the highest cardiometabolic risk. That looks like appropriate targeting, and it is the same logic as an eligibility threshold applied by judgment rather than by rule.
The finding that runs the wrong way
Children with less social vulnerability received more prescriptions: 76.1 per 10,000 against 49.2 among the most vulnerable.
Childhood obesity is commoner, not rarer, in the groups getting fewer prescriptions. So access here is tracking resources rather than need, which is the ordinary pattern for an expensive drug and is worth naming when the figure appears inside a paper about prescribing trends.
What it means for an adult reader
Two things, neither of them about children. The first is that a fold-change is not a prevalence, and any number of that shape should send you looking for the base.
The second is that who gets a prescription is decided by cost and coverage as much as by clinical need, which is visible in how few eligible adults ever receive one and in where sellers will and will not ship.