A record-high number of Americans say they have tried a weight-loss drug, a new national poll from Gallup found.

The survey showed that 15 percent of Americans reported using a weight-loss drug at any point, and that 11 percent of people said they were currently taking one. That’s up from 3 percent who said they were taking an obesity drug in 2024.

“This validates what I think we’re all seeing in practice, that it’s really dramatically changing how care is happening,” said Dr. Scott Hagan, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington who studies obesity.

The survey, published Tuesday, included over 5,000 adults across the country. It was conducted between late May and early June.

A number of factors have made weight-loss drugs more accessible over the last few years. Prices have crept down, especially for starting doses of the medications. New drugs have come out, some of them in pill form. And existing medications have been cleared to treat new conditions beyond weight loss, like liver disease, kidney disease and sleep apnea.

Dr. Janice Jin Hwang, the division chief of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said she was not surprised at all to see the number of Americans using these drugs go up.

“In fact,” she said, “I might have thought it would have been a little higher.”

The poll data also showed that the obesity rate in the United States is falling, dropping to 36.4 percent this year after a peak of 39.9 percent in 2022. Dan Witters, the research director at the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index who led the survey study, said weight-loss drugs are likely playing a role. And rates of diabetes diagnoses are now steady, after climbing for over a decade.

Among people who said they were currently using an obesity medication, 19 percent said that they were taking a compounded or customized version. These are tailor-made, copycat drugs that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Many people are taking compounded weight-loss drugs, despite the fact that the F.D.A. has said it would crack down on the medications being made at scale. The agency reiterated in June that compounded weight-loss drugs come with risks and should only be used in certain cases. But compounded medications tend to be cheaper, so many patients opt for them: In the survey, roughly one third of people who were taking a compounded medication said they had switched from a brand-name drug.

“Whatever guardrails are being put in place against that, they don’t seem to be doing a lot of effective work there,” Mr. Witters said.

The poll also demonstrates just how ubiquitous weight-loss drugs are now, having rapidly become household names in a matter of years. 91 percent of people surveyed said they are aware of these medications, up from 80 percent who said the same in 2024.