Benefiting once a week from tirzepatide, a treatment prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes, allows overweight or obese people to lose up to 24 kg.
- The most common side effects of tirzepatide were gastrointestinal disturbances. Most of them were mild to moderate in severity, occurring mainly with dose escalation.
- Side effects led to discontinuation of treatment in 4.3%, 7.1%, 6.2%, and 2.6% of participants receiving 5 mg, 10 mg, and 15 mg doses of tirzepatide and placebo.
“Obesity is a chronic disease that causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. The efficacy and safety of tirzepatide (sold as ‘Mounjaro’), a novel insulinotropic peptide receptor agonist glucose (GIP) and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor in obese people is not known”, American researchers said. To find out if this type 2 diabetes drug, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, had any effects on the weight of diabetic patients, scientists conducted a phase 3 trial. The results of this study were published in review The New England Journal of Medicine June 4.
Doses of 5 mg, 10 mg, or 15 mg of tirzepatide once a week
For the purposes of their work, the team recruited 2,539 obese or overweight adults with at least one weight-related complication. Participants had to inject themselves with doses of 5 mg, 10 mg or 15 mg of tirzepatide or a placebo once a week for 72 weeks. As a reminder, this drug acts on two hormones that help control blood sugar and are involved in sending satiety signals from the gut to the brain. “The endpoint was percent weight change from baseline and a weight reduction of 5% or more,” the authors said. At the start of the trial, the average weight of the volunteers was 104.8 kg, the average BMI was 38 and 94.5% of adults had a BMI of 30 or more.
Record weight loss thanks to tirzepatide
During the study, researchers noticed that people receiving the drug effectively lost weight. The results showed that the mean percent weight change at week 72 was -15% with 5 mg weekly doses of tirzepatide, -19.5% with 10 mg doses, -20 .9% with 15 mg doses and -3.1% with placebo. According to the scientists, the proportion of volunteers who showed a weight reduction of 5% or more was 85%, 89% and 91% with 5mg, 10mg and 15mg of tirzepatide, respectively, and 35% with the placebo .
The team found that 57% of participants receiving the 10mg and 15mg doses experienced a reduction in body weight of 20% or more, up to 24kg in some cases. “Nothing has allowed such weight loss, except surgery. (…) A weight loss of 15% to more than 20% could change the way doctors treat diabetes from reducing blood sugar to total remission, said Robert Gabbay, chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, in a statement.