What if the most effective treatment forobesity was to be looked for on the side of anti-diabetes drugs? This idea sounds crazy, and yet a new clinical study reports very satisfactory weight loss in obese and non-diabetic patients treated with a drug against diabetes type 2.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine this Thursday, July 2, this independent study reaffirms the effectiveness of liraglutide, marketed under the name Sadenxa and already approved by the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM) against obesity.
Liraglutide is an analogue of incretin (or Glucagon Like Peptide, GLP1), a naturally occurring molecule found in humans. At present, this medicine is mainly used in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes and is administered by subcutaneous injection.
Tested for 56 weeks on 3,731 obese or overweight people, liraglutide caused a significant weight loss of 8.4 kg on average, against 2.8 kg in the control group. Coming from several different continents (Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia), the participants were on average 45 years old and weighed around 106 kg, with an average body mass index (BMI) of 38, 3 kg / m². Liraglutide, which works by reducing appetite, was injected under the skin at a rate of 3 mg per day.
Result: at the end of treatment, 63% of patients in the treated group lost more than 5% of their initial body weight, compared with only 27% of patients in the control group, treated with a placebo. Better yet, 33% of people treated had lost at least 10% of their body weight compared to 10.6% of controls. 14% of people treated with liraglutide even lost more than 15% of their initial weight, compared to 3.5% of people without treatment. Although this weight loss is very encouraging, the patients treated remained obese. This treatment should therefore be combined with sufficient physical activity and a balanced diet for greater effectiveness.
Treatment with side effects to watch out for
If even small weight loss remains undeniably beneficial for health, this treatment does however have significant side effects. Doctors observed nausea (in 40% of patients treated against 14% in the placebo group), vomiting (20.9%), stones in the bile ducts (in 0.8% of patients treated), inflammation of the gallbladder (0.5% of cases) and even acute pancreatitis (0.2% of cases). A total of 6.2% of patients treated with liraglutide had side effects compared to 5% of patients who received placebo. Special monitoring will therefore be recommended when prescribing this medication.
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