Diabetes drug helps shed pounds

The drug, pramlintide, already approved for the treatment of diabetes, has recently been tested by obese people to lose weight and keep it off. Pramlintide is a synthetically created version of the natural hormone, amylin, made in the pancreas that tells the person when he or she has eaten enough food and also decreases the movement of the food throughout the stomach. Amylin, a small peptite hormone that is released into the blood stream by beta-cells of the pancreas after a meal, is deficient in individuals with diabetes.

Weyer and other Amylin researchers teamed with scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge for the new study. They assigned 411 random obese volunteers to have two or three injections of the drug daily for four months, although one in seven received placebo shots instead for the control.

No volunteer had diabetes, and they were told to reduce calorie intake and boost their exercise. No drug can induce weight loss without these two factors affectively.

After four months, the pramlintide-treated group lost almost twice what the placebo-treated people lost, with the highest dose volunteers losing the most.

The best result was that after the full 12-month trial, the placebo group had regained most of their body fat while the group getting the medium to high doses of pramlintide had lost 14 to 18 pounds on average.

The main side effect of pramlintide is nausea, where 9 to 29 percent of the volunteers complained of this depending on dosages, but as time progressed, the nausea dissipated and wasn’t much different from other hormone based drugs, as the body gets used to it.

“Getting weight off isn’t the challenge; keeping it off is,” said George Blackburn, a physician and nutritionist at Harvard Medical School. “Medication provides an edge that provides an edge that raises an individual’s morale and motivation to comply with beneficial lifestyle changes.”

This is interesting to me, because so many people rely on drugs for almost everything now, including weight loss.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/36766/title/Diabetes_drug_helps_shed_pounds