Current Drugs for Obesity - [Research]
Srivastava and Apovian (2017) have recently published a paper in Nature Reviews in which they go over the current approaches for managing/treating obesity with drugs.
Obesity often comes in the same package with diabetes and cardio-vascular disease - these being comorbidities. Ever since the early 1980s, world-wide rates of obesity have sky-rocketed, thus making the need for interventions a critical priority.
Lifestyle interventions including diet and exercise are so very seldom successful in of themselves, one of the possible reasons being that it's very hard to adhere to healthy lifestyle protocols over the long term. One of the factors for poor compliance is possibly the rich food environment we live, making it very easy to consume food over the daily requirements.
Some aggressive and invasive strategies like bariatric surgery are often successful, but the exact mechanisms of these have not been completely elucidated. Thus, more interventions (non-invasive) should be available as it would aid an individual to initiate and adhere to a healthier lifestyle over the long term.
As per the researchers:
"Anti-obesity drugs are approved in patients with a BMI ≥ 27 kg/m2 with at least one obesity-related comorbidity such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidaemia or sleep apnoea or in patients with a BMI ≥30 kg/m2." [source]
The 6 anti-obesity drugs that are currently FDA approved are:
- phentermine
- orlistat
- phentermine/topiramate extended release
- lorcaserin
- naltrexone sustained release/bupropion sustained release
- liraglutide.
As per the researchers, their efficacy is a modest 3-7% net weight loss. I would say that this is very decent, especially if we are talking about individuals with a BMI of over 35. Most of these drugs have contraindications, warnings and come with side effects, so we definitely need active research in this field.
The paper includes details and mechanisms of action, safety and efficacy for each of these drugs and compounds as well as potential avenues for further research and development. If you're interested and you'd like to read the full paper, here's the link:
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Cristi Vlad Self-Experimenter and Author
this is so helpful in the medical community
thanks you so much for giving us the most helpful info and it is helpful in the medical community
Thanks, but for obesity is better to have a good education.