Weight Loss and Health

I read an article today from popular science By Eric Hagerman that talked about a weight loss pill. There was a miracle pill out there in trials, but got trashed due to the fact that it contributed to at least 5 suicides and caused severe depression. There are a few other pills on the market now that actually do help you to lose weight. One is available over the counter and its called Alli. Alli helps by stopping the absorption fat. There is another one that controls your appetite.

Danish researchers recently decided to take aim at the brain chemicals serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, after noticing that an experimental treatment for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease caused patients to spontaneously lose weight. A complex network of cellular brakes and accelerators determines what, when and how much we eat. At the hub of this feedback system sits the hypothalamus, the brain’s appetite center. It coordinates input from other areas of the brain with signals from the body, including hormones produced by the stomach, pancreas and liver, for instance, that inhibit or stimulate appetite. Neurotransmitters are key governors of this system, and the drug tesofensine increases levels of all three.

The researchers compared different doses of tesofensine, licensed by the Danish company Neurosearch, against a placebo in a group of 203 obese patients. All the participants went on an exercise-restricted diet (typical in such trials), and after six months, the patients taking tesofensine had lost far more weight than the placebo group—12.6 percent versus 2 percent at the maximum dose. Even if you subtract the loss attributable to placebo (that is, diet alone), the resulting 10.6 percent is more than twice that with sibutramine, not to mention the “miracle” pill rimonabant. For the average person, that turned out to be 23 pounds. Louis Aronne, past president of the Obesity Society, who is not involved with the tesofensine trials, calls the results “very exciting.”

Like sibutramine, tesofensine increases heart rate by between five and nine beats per minute, which may or may not prove dangerous. Unlike sibutramine, however, the medium dose, which still elicited an average of 11.2 percent weight loss including the placebo effect, didn’t increase blood pressure, and that’s a key hurdle for someone with an elevated risk of heart disease. The other side effects were dry mouth, nausea, constipation, diarrhea and insomnia. On the upside, there was no increased risk of depression. Even more significant, the study authors didn’t exclude patients with a history of anxiety or depression—as Sanofi-Aventis did in the marquee rimonabant trials—making it less likely that they would uncover unexpected side effects in the general population.

Now ask yourself with all these potential side effects would you really still want to take this pill or any pill?

Tags: diet, diets, exercise, fat, food, health, health food, review, weight, weightloss

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 11:50 am and is filed under health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.